HTML Formatter

About HTML formatting

HTML is the markup that structures every web page. Minifying strips whitespace, comments, and redundant syntax to shrink the file for production; beautifying re-indents it so nested elements are easy to read and edit.

Whitespace inside <pre>, <textarea>, and a handful of other elements is significant to how the page renders, so a naive minifier that strips all whitespace indiscriminately would visibly break them. This one is whitespace-aware: it collapses insignificant space between ordinary tags while leaving whitespace-sensitive elements untouched. Ordinary <!-- comments --> are removed, but the old conditional-comment syntax some legacy sites still use for Internet Explorer, like <!--[if IE]>...<![endif]-->, is left completely intact, since it isn't a true comment but a directive that happens to be written inside comment syntax. Boolean attributes such as checked="checked" are also left exactly as written rather than shortened to their bare form.

Where you'll run into it

• Shrinking a page's markup before deploying it to production
• Pretty-printing markup returned by an API or server-side render for debugging
• Cleaning up HTML copied from a CMS export or another site
• Standardizing indentation before reviewing a markup diff

Frequently asked

Will minifying change how my page looks?
No. Only whitespace, comments, and redundant syntax are removed — the rendered result is the same.

Does this also minify inline CSS and JavaScript?
Yes. CSS inside <style> tags and JavaScript inside <script> tags are minified too, along with the surrounding markup.

Is my HTML stored?
No. Conversion happens on the server for that one request only; nothing is logged or kept afterward.

What happens to whitespace inside <pre> or <textarea>?
It's left alone. Those elements render their contents exactly as written, including line breaks and indentation, so collapsing whitespace inside them would change how the page actually looks — unlike the whitespace between ordinary tags, which is visually insignificant and safe to strip. This tool detects whitespace-sensitive elements and skips them specifically to avoid that.