HTML Cleaning vs HTML Formatting
Published: January 15, 2026
Author: HTML Beautifier Team
Reading Time: ~1 min read
Published on: | By Web Dev Team
While often confused, HTML cleaning (sanitization) and HTML formatting (beautification) serve entirely different purposes.
HTML Formatting
Formatting is about aesthetics and readability. It changes whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) but does not alter the actual tags, attributes, or content. It is a developer experience tool.
HTML Cleaning
Cleaning, or sanitization, is a security measure. It removes malicious tags (like <script>) or dangerous attributes (like onclick) from user-submitted HTML to prevent XSS attacks.
Which do you need?
If you are displaying user input on a page, you must Clean it. If you are reading source code in an editor, you want to Format it.