How to edit content in the visual editor and the HTML source view

A rich-text workbench with an HTML source view: type or paste content into the visual editor, format it with the toolbar, and switch to source view whenever you want to edit the markup directly. A preview dialog renders the current document, and source view is where you copy the finished HTML out.

The editor runs entirely in this tab. Nothing is uploaded and there is no save button, so copy the source before closing the page if you want to keep the result.

  1. Click inside the editing area and type or paste your content — plain text, or markup copied from another page.
  2. Format it with the toolbar: bold, italic, headings, lists, alignment, links, tables, images by URL and more.
  3. Press the source button to flip the same document into HTML view and edit tags and attributes as text.
  4. Use Preview to render the current document in a dialog, or Clean up HTML and Auto format to strip styling or reflow the markup.
  5. Copy the HTML out of source view — the page does not save anything for you.

What the editor does with your content

Toolbar and dialogs

The toolbar covers undo and redo, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, headings H1 to H4, font family and size, text and background colours, alignment, numbered and bulleted lists, indent, subscript and superscript, line height, links, images, tables with cell merge and split, horizontal rules, emoticons, anchors and page breaks.

The image, media and Flash dialogs insert from a URL because file uploads are disabled in this editor. Code blocks are inserted as pre elements with a language class such as lang-js; the page does not load a syntax highlighter.

Source view and markup normalisation

Source view and the visual editor are two views of the same document, and switching between them re-renders the markup. The editor normalises what it renders — for example a horizontal rule comes back as a self-closing tag, an inline style gains a trailing semicolon, and tables receive a tbody wrapper.

A round trip through the visual editor is therefore not byte-for-byte identical to the source you typed. Keep the original markup elsewhere if exact bytes matter, and use source view when you need to hand-edit tags.

Processing, privacy and limits

Everything happens in the browser tab: content is never uploaded, the editor keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and there is no save or publish button — the document exists only until you close the tab.

The editor targets ordinary web content. Very large documents can make the editing area sluggish, and pasted content keeps the styles it arrives with unless you strip them with the Clean up HTML tool.

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