Starter needs basic help to display html page / to alter html documents

[tribe_of_frog]

Hi there,

I just started to build websites.

My problem is, that if I create a html document on my mac with textedit, only the source code is displayed if I open it with a browser. ( I have checked the code for any mistakes already)

The other way around, if I open a lecture html file with textedit, the source code is not displayed to alter it.

How can I alter source codes from existing html files with textedit?
How can I display the the html document properly in a browser?

Thanks for your help!

[xhtmlcoder]

If you are seeing the source code instead of the web page (when opened in the browser) then the file is not getting saved with the *.html or *.htm extension.

I don’t have a Mac but I do remember some people say there is a TextEdit mode more specially suited to writing markup.

@Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS (page 5)

However, we want to work with TextEdit as a plain text editor, so you’ll need to adjust some of TextEdit’s preferences. Start TextEdit, then select TextEdit > Preferences from the menu to bring up the Preferences screen. Select Plain text within New Document Attributes, then close the Preferences screen.

I suspect you’ll have to alter the setting to something similar as described.

[PixelStyles]

It sounds like the file extension is incorrect as xhtmlcoder is saying. In OSX go to Finder, preferences and there should be an option to shown known file extensions I think it is. (at work on horrid XP so I can’t check for you). You probably have a scenario where is making “filename.html.txt” and its using the txt extension.