HTML Formatter Online

What an HTML formatter actually does

Formatting reads your markup, identifies where each tag opens and closes, and re-prints it with consistent indentation. Block-level elements move onto their own lines, child elements are pushed one level deeper than their parent, and short elements that hold only text — a <title> or a <li> with a single label — stay on one line so the output is compact where it can be.

Crucially, formatting never touches the meaning of your document. The tags, attributes and text content are identical before and after; only the whitespace between them changes. Because browsers ignore that whitespace between block elements, the page renders exactly the same — you just get markup a human can finally follow.

How to format HTML

• Copy the HTML from your editor, a "view source" panel, a CMS export or a minified bundle.
• Paste it into the input panel of the formatter.
• Pick an indent width — 2 spaces is the web standard, 4 spaces suits teams that prefer wider nesting, and tabs let each developer set their own display width.
• Read the indented result on the right, then copy it or download it as an .html file.

The detector recognises markup automatically, so you usually do not have to choose a language. If you are pasting a tiny fragment with no tags, switch the language selector to HTML to force the right mode.

Embedded CSS and JavaScript are handled too

Real-world pages are rarely pure markup. They carry <style> rules in the head and <script> logic before the closing body tag. A good HTML formatter cannot simply re-indent those blocks as if they were text — it has to understand them. This tool runs the contents of every style block through its CSS formatter and every script block through its JavaScript formatter, so the whole document comes out consistently indented, not just the markup around the edges.

Two elements are deliberately left alone: <pre> and <textarea>. Whitespace inside them is significant — it is rendered to the user — so reformatting it would change what visitors see. The tool preserves their contents byte for byte.

Choosing an indent size

Match whatever your repository already uses so your diff stays small. If you are formatting a one-off snippet to read it, the default of two spaces is the safest choice.

Nothing leaves your browser

Many online formatters quietly send your markup to a server to process it. If that HTML contains draft copy, internal URLs, customer data baked into a template or anything else you would rather keep private, that is a leak. This formatter does the work entirely in JavaScript on your own machine. You can prove it: open your browser's network tab and watch — there is no request when you format — or disconnect from the internet and the tool keeps working. Local processing also means there is no upload wait, so even large documents reflow the instant you paste them.