HTML Tools and Converters

HTML is forgiving by design, browsers recover from unclosed tags and malformed markup rather than refusing to render. That tolerance makes it pleasant to write and awkward to process, because there is no single correct parse of a broken document.

Whitespace is the trap in any HTML formatter. Between block elements it is insignificant and can be reformatted freely. Inside a pre or textarea it is rendered literally, so re-indenting changes what the user sees. Between inline elements it is a word separator, so removing it joins two words together.

Converting HTML to Markdown is lossy in a way that is easy to underestimate: classes, ids, inline styles and any element without a Markdown equivalent simply disappear. Content that carried meaning through styling loses that meaning entirely.