About project

Right now, www.preformatter.com is a simple online tool or service, which helps to make preformatted HTML code from the normal text. This preformatted HTML code can be used in site templates with HTML layout, or you can insert it right in a WYSIWYG editor in plain HTML mode. In simple terms, the service helps you easily convert big amount of text in well-formatted HTML code.

Why do you need it?

Working as a web developer for a long time, I realized that no one likes to keep HTML code well-formatted, clean, and simple. Neither clients, neither copywriters, neither content managers, and, especially, developers. And no one thinks about other approaches to work with text and HTML code, to make life easier.

As I worked a lot with programming code I realized, that the more the code is structured and formatted for smooth reading, the easier it is to perceive and edit. You spend way less time on maintaining and updating well-structured and formatted code. That's why many computer languages have evolved code formatting standards and sometimes even do not let you code without following these standards. This is also true for the HTML code.

One can say that HTML code is much simpler than a computer programming language code, like PHP, Java, Python, etc. That's right, until you come across a really big and unstructured text. Let’s see an example.

<h2>Global dates and times</h2><p>A global date and time consists of a specific proleptic-Gregorian date, consisting of a year, a month, and a day, and a time, consisting of an hour, a minute, a second, and a fraction of a second, expressed with a time-zone offset, consisting of a signed number of hours and minutes.</p><p>A string is a valid global date and time string representing a date, time, and a time-zone offset if it consists of the following components in the given order:</p><ul><li>A valid date string representing the date</li><li>A U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T character (T) or a U+0020 SPACE character</li><li>A valid time string representing the time</li><li>A valid time-zone offset string representing the time-zone offset</li></ul><p>Times in dates before the formation of UTC in the mid twentieth century must be expressed and interpreted in terms of UT1 (contemporary Earth mean solar time at the 0° longitude), not UTC (the approximation of UT1 that ticks in SI seconds). Time before the formation of time zones must be expressed and interpreted as UT1 times with explicit time zones that approximate the contemporary difference between the appropriate local time and the time observed at the location of Greenwich, London.</p>

Let’s compare it with the same text but well-structured

<h2>Global dates and times</h2>
<p>
A global date and time consists of a specific proleptic-Gregorian date, consisting of a year, a month, and a day, and a time, consisting of an hour, a minute, a second, and a fraction of a second, expressed with a time-zone offset, consisting of a signed number of hours and minutes.
</p>
<p>
A string is a valid global date and time string representing a date, time, and a time-zone offset if it consists of the following components in the given order:
</p>
<ul>
<li>A valid date string representing the date</li>
<li>A U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T character (T) or a U+0020 SPACE character</li>
<li>A valid time string representing the time</li>
<li>A valid time-zone offset string representing the time-zone offset</li>
</ul>
<p>
Times in dates before the formation of UTC in the mid twentieth century must be expressed and interpreted in terms of UT1 (contemporary Earth mean solar time at the 0° longitude), not UTC (the approximation of UT1 that ticks in SI seconds). Time before the formation of time zones must be expressed and interpreted as UT1 times with explicit time zones that approximate the contemporary difference between the appropriate local time and the time observed at the location of Greenwich, London.
</p>

It is quite obvious that the second text is more comprehensible. If you need to maintain this text or make some changes to it, you will spend less time on the second version. Thanks for the clearness of well-formatted HTML code with your text inside. However, making a text well-formatted is not that simple and takes time. Just to make this task easier, I have created this service. If you want to learn more about it, how it works, and what syntax it uses, please read the help page. Enjoy your work!

P.S. All texts for this site was preformatted with this service :)