On page 31 of Ian Lloyd’s book “Build your own website the right way” he gives directions on typing web language into a text editor. I have done this and filed it as basic.html. having selected UTF-8 but when I open the page in the Web folder of my documents it comes out in the same web language. I don’t know what I am doing wrong
Hi DeclanDunne! Welcome to SitePoint. 
It’s not really clear what you are saying here. Could you give an example of how you are “typing web language”? And what do you mean by “comes out in the same web language”?
It sounds like you are expecting French to be translated into ?English (for example) by the browser, which is not possible, I’m afraid. If that’s not what you meant, please elucidate the problem a bit more.
What I mean by web language is this:
<br />
It’s not really clear what you are saying here. Could you give an example of how you are "typing web language"? And what do you mean by "comes out in the same web language"?<br />
<br />
When I typed material into the text editor and saved it, the web commands and by these I mean , for example, <br /> , the commands came up. What I wanted to see was how the commands would configure the text I had written.
I hope you understand that not all people are as versed in this as you are.
Thank you for replying
I still don’t follow, but it’s sounding like you are typing
<br />
along with your text, and that what you see in the browser is
<br />
instead of a line break?
If that’s the case, you can’t type code into a WYSIWYG (or ‘design view’) of an editor. You would have to type that directly into the code (via code view). In design view, you can do a ‘soft return’, by holding the Shift key while you press Enter/Return.
If that doesn’t answer the question, perhaps try to describe in more detail what you are doing. You don’t need to use any fancy terminology for it. Just describe, in plain language, step-by-step what you are doing and seeing.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to help me with my request. All is working well now.