Do you need to create standards-compliant Web pages? You can do all of the work by hand, or use a little tool called HTML Tidy to help you out. This review looks at what HTML Tidy can and can't do, and how it can help you clean up your Web pages
A Web author worth his or her salt wants to create Web pages that comply with standards. That means no badly-formed HTML -- no missing tags, proprietary extensions, constructs that break in all but one or two browsers. These errors are annoying and can be avoided with little time and effort.
There are numerous applications and online services that validate HTML syntax. More often than not, though, they're good but not great. Most will check HTML, but not correct it. If you have a lot of files, you check each one and make corrections by hand. This takes a lot of time and effort. All in all, just about every app and service out there is either too bulky or lacks the functionality that you need.
Weighing in at only a few hundred kilobytes (believe me, this is tiny for a program that packs this much punch), HTML Tidy is the closest you'll get to a perfect HTML utility. Not only does it check HTML files, Tidy fixes the problems it finds and does a whole lot more. Tidy proves that a lot of functions can be crammed into a tiny package.
Tidy is an anachronism in the world of the graphical user interface. It's a command line application, meaning you have to type a string of commands to get Tidy to run. It may sound like an old fashioned way of doing things, however it's anything but. The command line interface gives Tidy a great deal of flexibility. And it has a feature -- discussed later -- that can save you keystrokes.
How It Works
Tidy fixes a number of common, and not so common, mistakes in HTML files. It does this by analyzing the markup in a file and comparing it to the HTML 4.01 specification. Depending on the options you specify, Tidy can fixes the problems it finds or it can generate a log detailing the errors.
The range of problems Tidy can fix is impressive. It can add missing or mis-matched end tags, correct tags that are in the wrong order, insert quotes around attributes, and can even add missing > to a tag. One of the few things Tidy can't do is add SUMMARY attributes to tables. You'll have to go in and add that attribute manually.