The most important HTML tool : TIDY

When you are working with HTML, the chance that you would make mistakes in the code is great, and rising with the length of the document. In order to help the HTML coders work with great amount of code, creating from the sloppy and badly-written code a clear and nicely laid markup, David Ragget wrote the HTML TIDY utility.

TIDY can correct the mismatched tags, correct the tags put in the wrong order, and it can perfect the lists that miss some required tags. It practically reduces to zero the work needed to be done by the coder on correcting errors.

This utility is famous for being able to fix a great range of problems, and also bring to your attention the errors it doesn’t know how to solve by itself. TIDY will show you what error is unable to solve, with the line and column numbering the code. The other problems it is able to solve by itself will be shown as warnings.

Now, Dave Ragget no longer works on this project, it is being continued by a group of volunteers on the Source Forge community. The source code remains open under an open source license, and if you found some problems or bug, or you have some enhancements requests, or wrote some patches.

Another way TIDY s known to make miracles is editing the HTML produces from WYSIWYG HTML editors. It changes radically the code received from Word 2000 and even from Word 1997, is you use the “Word-2000” config option.

TIDY was made for Linux, so it was created according to the UNIX philosophy: a program should do one thing, but should do it good. Even though it has no GUI and you have to read the manuals in order to be able to use it and know all the available options, it does its own job excellently.