How to Beautify CSS, HTML and XML (Free Formatters)

Minified code is great for production and terrible for humans — one giant line with no spacing. When you need to read, debug or edit CSS, HTML or XML, beautifying it back into an indented structure makes all the difference. Here's how.

Beautify CSS

Paste minified or messy styles into the CSS beautifier and get one rule per line, properly indented. Perfect for understanding a stylesheet you didn't write or cleaning up generated CSS.

Format HTML

Tangled or minified markup becomes readable with the HTML formatter, which indents elements by nesting depth so you can see the structure at a glance — great for scraped or generated HTML.

Pretty-print XML

Config files, feeds and API responses in XML are far easier to debug when indented. The XML formatter lays out elements by depth so nesting is obvious.

Beautify vs minify: when to use each

Beautify while developing, reviewing or debugging — readability wins. Minify before shipping to production to cut file size and speed up load. Reverse these with the CSS minifier, HTML minifier and JavaScript minifier.

A tip on generated code

Formatters indent by structure but won't fix broken syntax — if beautified output looks wrong, the source likely has an unclosed tag or brace. Validate JSON separately with the JSON validator.