Visual HTML Editor: Write A Page Without Writing Code

This is a two-pane online HTML editor. On the left is a visual editing surface: headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, bulleted and numbered lists, quotes, code and links, with keyboard shortcuts for the ones you use most. On the right is the HTML that describes what you just wrote, indented and readable. Edit either side and the other follows, so you can lay a page out visually and still hand-tune a tag when you want to.

Why The Output Is The Point

Most free WYSIWYG editors produce markup no one would write by hand. A single pasted paragraph can arrive wrapped in four nested <span> elements, each carrying a font family, a font size and a transparent background colour, plus a class from whichever program it came out of. It renders, but it is unreadable, it fights any stylesheet you add later, and it triples the size of the file. This editor runs every change through a whitelist first: a known list of tags is kept, six attributes are kept, and everything else is either unwrapped so its words survive or removed. There are no style attributes and no <span> tags in the output, ever.

Who It Is For

Anyone who needs a page and does not want to open a code editor to get one: a note for a class, a menu, an announcement, a set of directions, a one-page brief. It is also useful to people who do write HTML, as a fast way to turn a document someone emailed you into markup you would be willing to commit. Paste the text of a Word document or a Google Doc into the visual side, check the source pane, and you have the skeleton of a page in about ten seconds.

How It Works

Everything happens in your browser. The editing surface is a plain editable region, the formatting commands are the browser's own, and the cleaning step is a small script that runs on your device. Nothing is uploaded while you write, including anything you paste. The one moment your page leaves the browser is when you press Publish, and that is a deliberate click.

What It Deliberately Will Not Keep

The whitelist is strict, so some things are dropped on purpose: text colours, font choices, font sizes, centring and other alignment, background shading, and Word's automatic bullets, which are not really lists but paragraphs with a symbol in front of them. Tables and images survive, but their widths and borders do not. If you need that level of control, write the HTML by hand and tidy it with the HTML formatter, or check the finished markup in the HTML viewer. The trade is a deliberate one: plain, structural HTML is what makes a page easy to restyle, easy to read on a phone and easy to hand to somebody else.

Then Put It On A Link

A page is not much use in a text box. The publish button below the editor wraps what you wrote in a complete HTML document with a readable stylesheet and puts it on a free OxyPages address with HTTPS, in seconds, with no account. The link lasts 30 minutes; claiming it is free, keeps it permanently, and lets you choose your own address, with custom domains available on paid plans. Instant publishing accepts pages up to 5 MB. See how it works or compare plans.