When "viewing source", some sites have neat markup, some sites don't. Why? (pic attached)

Notice how in the 'ugly' side, the doctype is all the way indented and some of the meta lines extend past the left indent.

How can I get my markup looking neat when viewing source in a browser? Is there a开发者_Go百科 certain way to encode the code while using an editor? I use Notepad++ by the way.

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Large blocks of unindented code like you see in the left hand side are probably being written out server side, and so although the tag that creates them is nicely indented in your HTML the erver script output will not honour that.

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It's not about encoding, it's about writing neat source code, haha. If you are outputting from php or something you can use keep track of how far to indent each thing or you an use some sort of template output function that keeps track of how many tags are open for you and indents the correct amount each time. But, there is no point on having neat HTML, the only important thing is that it's valid. Developer Tools will make it neat for you when you're trying to debug, and actually removing all that whitespace used to make it neat can reduce your page size quite a bit.

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The ugly ones probably look pretty in the underlying php or other source. Once generated into HTML it looks ugly, and very few programmers will try to make that pretty too - it's not worth it.

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It's funny that what you list as "ugly" seems properly indented to me... at least from what I can tell from the screenshot.

In any case, it doesn't matter. Most of the time these days, sites are made with something dynamic, and a lot of the HTML formatting isn't explicitly output.

If you were to view the source on many of my sites, it is all rammed together on one line, as that is how I echo it out. I don't see the point in wasting bytes on line feeds. Especially these days with all of the browser tools available that reformat the source while debugging.

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I use Eclipse to do my coding and I can use Source->Format to clean up my code and format it nicely.

For Notepad++, I believe you can use HTML tidy as per: Formatting code in Notepad++

TextFX -> HTML Tidy -> Tidy: Reindent XML

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You really want your HTML code to look like this: view-source:http://lightningsoul.com/

As it uses the minimum amount of data to present itself to the browser. Remember that indents and white-spaces consume data as well as any other character.