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Before using the PrettyPrinter, your HTML looks like me (in other words, scruffy)...

Welcome to the HTML PrettyPrinter. Inspired by tools I first used 20 years ago to make my demented hackery readable to the long-suffering teaching assistants at Cornell University 1 who had the extremely dubious honor of grading my computer-science projects, this utility helps you read and debug HTML pages, particularly those with complex table structures, by reformatting the HTML so that it is much easier to understand the structural relationships.

...but after using the PrettyPrinter, your HTML will look like my wonderful youngest son, Alexander Ryuusei Ueki. (Alexander is expressing his opinion of dinner, not of your code!)

Enter your HTML in the form below, click on the Beautify button, and it will be magically transformed into a hopefully more readable form. Most of the important structural tags (those in the form <tag> ... </tag>) will cause indenting and exdenting. Some tags (such as FORM and TABLE) will generate vertical lineup marks to help you find the start and end of the structures. Finally, table structures are parsed for correctness.

Notes:

• If an error is found in the HTML, it may cause other spurious errors to be generated later on, in particular if your tables are screwed up. So often the best technique is to fix one error at a time. The reason for this is because I just whipped up a quick and dirty stack-based parser ².
• The parser is quite strict, and expects all tags to be closed, and no tags may be implied. So <TABLE><TD> is a real no-no. And it expects tags to be properly nested. It most certainly does not grant you the kind of slack that most browsers do!
• Once your HTML survives the encounter with this utility, it might be a good idea to run other, more general HTML checkers on it. I like to use WebLint, but there are many others. The WebLint pages have links to many similar resources, as does Yahoo!
• Keep in mind that the point of this utility is to help you understand the structure of your HTML (and the errors in it), and not to create nice looking executable HTML. The indenting and lineup marks make it easier for you to understand what is going on in your code, but the output won't be understandable by a browser.

The PrettyPrinter is written entirely in Websiphon by Purity Software, the coolest active HTML solution in the known universe. It took about 3 hours to design, code, and debug³. Copyright (C) 1997 by Robert J. Woodhead. All Rights Reserved. Comments, suggestions and small unmarked bills⁴ gratefully accepted. You can even see and copy the source code and see other weird things I've done!

1) The Cornell University Fight Song:

High above Cayuga's waters, there's an awful smell.
Some say it's Cayuga's waters, we know it's Cornell!

2) My first experience with the joys of stack-based parsers with marginal error recovery was when working on a Data General minicomputer around 1980 at the Cornell Hotel School. They had this wonderful language called MOBOL that was "optimized" for hotel applications. It was based on a macro-expansion package, and recursively macro-expanded MOBOL source all the way down to assembly language. A brilliant hack, except that a single character out of place in a MOBOL program generated 37 pages of recursive error messages, none of which had any bearing on the original error! We called it "MOBOL, Language of Kings" because if you understood it, you had the power of life and death over the entire Hotel. Needless to say, the prof who installed it was extremely bright; was the only guy who really understood it; and got tenure extremely quickly.

3) And another 5 hours writing these cute comments, of course.

4) Actually, I am not picky about the size, shape or color of the bills, as long as the bank will accept them.