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HTML Editor

Oxygen XML Author includes a specialized HTML editor and various editing features for files that have the html or htm file extensions. The encoding is detected automatically based on the value specified in the @charset attribute of the <meta> element.

Note: If an HTML document has an XHTML namespace, or there is an XSD schema declared, or there is a PUBLIC ID specified in a DOCTYPE, or there is a SYSTEM ID with a value other than "about:legacy-compat", then the document will be opened as an XHTML file.

New Document Template

Oxygen XML Author includes a new document template to help you get started creating HTML content. It is available when creating new documents from templates and can be found in the New Document folder or by typing html in the search field.

Text Mode Editor

You can edit HTML files in the Text editing mode using all of its useful features. It includes content completion based on a special HTML schema, syntax highlighting, a specialized Outline view that presents the structure, folding support, and more.

HTML documents support formatting and indenting single or multiple documents to make them more readable. The formatting works even if the document is not XML well-formed and it also works on embedded CSS or JavaScript code. The HTML formatting details are similar to those for XML documents. For details, see Formatting and Indenting XML Documents.

Author Mode Editor

You can edit HTML files in the visual Author editing mode, but when opening an HTML document in Author mode, if it is not considered well-formed according to XML standards, you will see a warning message at the top of the editor explaining that once you make a modification, the document will be automatically converted to proper XML structure. For more details, see XML Well-Formedness Details for HTML Documents.

When editing HTML documents in Author mode, you have access to many of the same authoring features and actions as you have with XHTML documents. You also have the benefit of CSS rendering and you can specify a CSS file to be associated with an HTML document.

HTML-Specific Contextual Menu Actions

There are some specialized actions (available in the contextual menu when you right-click anywhere in the current HTML document) that invoke features unique to HTML documents. These contextual menu actions include:

View in Browser/System Application: Opens the HTML document in your default browser.
Minify HTML: Compresses the HTML document by removing unnecessary white spaces, without affecting the functionality of the document, but significantly reducing the loading time in Web browsers.
HTML to XML Well-formed (Available in both Text and Author modes): Converts the currently edited HTML document to be XML well-formed. This means that unclosed tags will be properly closed, unquoted attribute values will be quoted, and more. This is helpful if, for example, you use XSLT stylesheets while applying transformations on HTML documents (since the transformation will require the HTML document to be XML well-formed).