htmless

Lighten your HTML input. Keep the meaning, ditch the weight.

🧠 What is it?

htmless is a minimalist CLI tool that strips HTML down to the bone — removing unnecessary scripts, styles, attributes, and utility classes. The result is a clean, minified HTML output, ideal for feeding into LLMs where every token counts.

🤔 Why was it created?

I needed to extract semantically valuable content from HTML pages and send it to AI models. But raw HTML is full of bloat — especially utility classes from frameworks like Tailwind, inline styles, scripts, and other things that eat tokens without adding real value.

The goals were simple:

• Preserve document structure – headings, paragraphs, text emphasis
• Keep href attributes on <a> tags – they carry semantic meaning and useful context
• Eliminate noise
• Make it fast, simple, and automatable
• Follow the Unix philosophy — do one thing and do it well

🔧 Installation

pnpm add -g htmless
# or
npm install -g htmless

🚀 Usage

cat input.html | htmless

Use it in a bash pipeline, before LLM processing, or to clean up WYSIWYG HTML exports.

💡 Example

Input:

<div class="bg-white p-4 text-sm text-gray-700">
  <h1 class="text-3xl font-bold">Welcome</h1>
  <p>This is a <strong>test</strong>.</p>
  <script>alert('Hi')</script>
  <style>body { background: red; }</style>
</div>

Output:

<div><h1>Welcome</h1><p>This is a <strong>test</strong>.</p></div>

🛠️ What gets removed?

• all HTML attributes (class, id, style, data-*, etc.)
• <script> and <style> blocks
• comments and whitespace
• (exception: href on <a> is preserved)

🔎 Who is this for?

• developers working with LLMs and prompt engineering
• anyone who needs to get meaningful content from HTML without the fluff
• scripting, scraping, automation pipelines

🧪 Tech info

• built on top of htmlparser2 — fast and robust
• outputs valid HTML (not plaintext)
• written in TypeScript, clean CLI with commander

🧘 Philosophy

Less is more. Tokens are expensive. htmless helps LLMs process content, not the wrapper.

👤 Author

Made with ❤️ by BroJor

📄 License

ISC License © 2025 BroJor