Web Design with HTML and CSS

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Web editors versus WYSIWYG tools

Web Design with HTML and CSS Digital Classroom

Using Notepad or TextEdit as a web editor

Windows Notepad can be found on any Windows system in the Accessories panel. You can

create an HTML document by following these steps:

1 Choose Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad, and when the Notepad

window appears, choose File > New.

By default, the fi le is saved in the text (.txt) format and so any HTML tags that

the fi le contains cannot be interpreted by a web browser.

2 In Notepad, select File > Save As. Change the fi le extension from .txt to .html

in the fi le name fi eld.

3 Specify “All Files” in the Save as type fi eld. Set the Encoding value to UTF-8

instead of ANSI; this is the necessary encoding for HTML pages.

4 Click the Save button.

If you work on a Mac OS computer, you can use the TextEdit application to create or modify

HTML and CSS fi les.

1 On your Mac, open the Applications folder and locate the TextEdit application.

By default, TextEdit is designed to open and save documents as .rtf (rich text

format) fi les. In order to use it successfully for HTML, you must change the

application preferences.

2 Choose TextEdit > Preferences. The Preferences dialog box opens.

3 In the New Document tab, click to select the Plain text radio button. With this

option selected, TextEdit creates only plain text without any formatting applied

to the text.

4 Click the Open and Save tab and select the radio buttons for both Ignore rich

text commands in HTML fi les and Ignore rich text commands in RTF fi les. With

these options selected, TextEdit will open and create HTML fi les. You also

need to deselect the Add “.txt” extension to plain text fi les option as you will be

specifying the .html extension when you save.

5 In the HTML Saving Options group, set the document type to XHTML 1.0

Transitional, make sure the Styling menu is set to Embedded CSS, and make

sure the Encoding menu is set to Unicode (UTF-8).

6 Close the Preferences dialog box and exit TextEdit by selecting TextEdit > Quit

TextEdit. Then restart TextEdit by double-clicking the icon in the Applications

folder. When you restart the program, the new preferences will be used.