One of the great pains of writing code is dealing with messy, barely-readable code. However, with the tools mentioned and linked in this article, you can beautify your HTML to make it easier to read.
This is an article on the best tools to beautify HTML.
What are HTML Beautifiers?
HTML Beautifiers are, as you probably guessed, tools used to beautify your HTML code. They take in messy code, format it correctly, and return beautiful HTML. Several things will be corrected during formatting, such as creating appropriate new lines, correcting spacing, and correctly indenting code.
This makes your code easier to read and ensures that your entire codebase follows accepted best practices. It also helps you catch bugs earlier and improve productivity as you don’t have to format your HTML manually. There are multiple tools for beautifying your HTML, and in this article, I will mention some of the popular ones.
Benefits of Beautifying HTML
✅ You improve your code’s readability. This makes it easier for you and others to read the code. As a result, developer productivity will be improved.
✅ It enables you to follow best practices and use standard formatting.
✅ It enables you to create uniformity in your code spaces, for example, using spaces or tabs, how much indentation to use, etc.
Best Tools for Beautifying HTML
In this section, I will list the best tools for beautifying your HTML tools. I have separated the tools into two categories: online and desktop. First, we will cover the desktop tools.
Desktop Tools
The first set of tools we will cover in this article are desktop tools. Desktop tools are ideal as they conveniently run locally to beautify the HTML files you have on the system.
Some of these tools integrate with VSCode, a popular code editor, and will work seamlessly to beautify your HTML as you write.
Prettier
Prettier is probably the most popular tool for formatting your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is very opinionated. Therefore, it formats your code to its predefined standard without many options for variations. While it is primarily a desktop tool, you can still run it online and format your code.
It can be installed on popular IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, WebStorm, and Vim as an extension. You can install it as an NPM package and format your code from the command line. This enables you to format your code in a wider variety of settings.
It even supports frameworks such as React, Angular, and Vue and different flavors of CSS such as SCSS. It can also format GraphQL, YAML, Markdown, and Handlebars.
Prettier is probably the best tool to format your HTML code if its popularity is anything to go by. Therefore, it is my HTML Beautifier of choice.
JS Beautify
JS Beautify is a popular NPM library for beautifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is a full-featured formatter comparable to prettier. However, unlike Prettier, it is unavailable as a VS Code extension.
Nonetheless, it is capable of performing a lot of tasks to beautify your HTML. These include proper indentation, inserting line breaks, and preserving or removing comments. Formatting options can be specified in a config file for each project or as a profile that can be reused across different projects.
JS Beautify is available as either an NPM or PIP Package. However, the PIP version can only format JavaScript, while the NPM version can format JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Once installed, it can format files from the command line. Alternatively, you can load the package to a browser using their CDN.
AB HTML Formatter
AB HTML Formatter is a simple tool for beautifying your HTML. Unlike Prettier, which does many things, AB HTML Formatter will do just one thing – format your HTML. While having fewer features might seem bad, it enables the formatter to run fast and efficiently.
AB Formatter is ideal when you do not want to slow down your VSCode with many large extensions.
To beautify your code, all you have to do to format your HTML is press Alt + Shift + F , and AB Formatter will do the rest.
Online Tools
An alternative to desktop tools is online tools. Unlike desktop tools, online tools do not require installation. This is because online tools are available through websites where you upload your code and download the formatted code.
However, the workflow of copying your code, formatting it, and pasting it back is tedious, especially compared to desktop tools that beautify your HTML in place. Nonetheless, online tools still have a use case, and there are various tools to beautify your HTML. These include:
Dirty Markup
Dirty Markup is a free online tool to format your HTML. It is one of the best online tools to beautify your HTML code. It is customizable with different options for indentation, line length, and adding empty lines for clarity.
The website also offers a custom API for programmatically beautifying your HTML. This would be useful for adding HTML Beautifying into your CI/CD workflow.
HTML Formatter
HTML Formatter is a simple beautifier for your HTML code. Unlike the other tools this article covers, it does not have customization options.
In addition to HTML, it also formats JSON, XML, YAML, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, and C++. The website also offers additional services such as validating your HTML, viewing your HTML output, minifying HTML, and converting Excel and Jade to HTML. All of these services are provided for free online.
HTML Viewer
HTML Viewer is a decent tool in this category. In addition to copy-pasting code, you can upload a file or submit a URL. Customization options are limited; you can only change the spacing on indentations. However, in addition to beautifying your HTML, it can also minify it.
Like HTML Formatter, HTML Viewer has many features, such as beautifiers for your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, YAML, XML, and many other languages. It also has converters between data representation formats such as JSON and XML, SQL, and CSV. It can also compile CSS from SCSS and LESS. Like other online services mentioned here, it is completely free.
Final Words
In this article, we discussed the different tools that can be used to beautify your HTML. Next, read this article on Creating an HTML editor.