I’ve always found Tidy to be an extremely useful tool. So useful, in fact, that we decided to include the option to Tidy webpages directly into Surreal CMS. After rekindling my love for Tidy as a developer, I soon decided that, for the average user, Tidy was not very friendly out-of-the-box.

After extensive searching online, I happened across a number of Windows GUIs, web-based versions, and some other not-so-useful-for-me Tidy interfaces. The best ones, of course, were the web-based versions, but most of them tried to give me so many options that it just wasn’t useful for my everyday use. Others just seemed a bit tacky, so I decided to get my hands dirty and write my own :)

The result is a simplified, web-based Tidy interface that saves your preferences for up to one year using a cookie. The options have been divided up into two categories, Simple and Advanced, and contain only the features that the average web designer will find useful. You can paste raw HTML code or a URL to fetch a remote webpage for cleaning. I call it Dirty Markup :)

Dirty Markup was built using jQuery and jQuery UI, so I had to take advantage of their accordion menu, slider, and their awesome CSS framework. Check it out and tell me what you think. I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions.