Spotlight doesn't find html files

EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement

I had a similar issue and discovered that I had HTML coding error in the [head] section. I left off the "/" in the closing such that the head section was implicitly closed but not explicitly closed with a [/head]. I'm using square brackets in this reply to prevent issues.

In any case, if manually coding your HTML files be sure that is not a coding issue with start-tag and end-tag particularly in the HEAD part of the HTML file. Spotlight may be sensitive to HTML code that is not standard.

My issue may not be yours but my point was to let you and others know that if the HTML code itself is not matched (I think particularly in the [head] ... [/head] section) that Spotlight will not index the terms in the "body" of the HTML because it thinks the entire files is one large [head] section.

I manually created these HTML files with TextWrangler and typically copy and past HTML code as a template. I did not have a [/head] in the head section (in error I left off the preceding /) so although Safari and other web browsers displayed the files correctly, Spotlight "saw" no body because there was no [/head] to explicitly end the header section so it skipped over the entire file. It was interpreting the HTML file with a strict interpretation - where there is a [head] - the header continues - until there is a [/head]. Note: Once again I have replace square brackets for the angle brackets that are actually used in the code.

In short, Spotlight does interpret the HTML code in a strict manner I believe so as to only index terms that the end user might actually see (e.g. those in the body).

This will be moot point if you look at your HTML files can confirm that [head] is closed properly with [/head].

This frustrated me for a while until I saw the missing "/" in my closing.

Actually I apologize as I confused this post with another about not being able to find terms (content) inside of HTML files. Your issue is not finding the HTML files as files.