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Writing HTML in Notepad

By , About.com Guide

If you use Windows, you don't need to buy or download an editor in order to write HTML. You have a perfectly functional editor built into your operating system -- Notepad.

In fact, for many people this is all the HTML editor they will ever need.

There are only a few steps to creating a Web page with Notepad:

  1. Open Notepad
    Notepad is nearly always found in your "Accessories" menu.

  2. Start writing your HTML
    Remember that you need to be more careful than in an HTML editor. You won't have elements like tag completion and validation.

  3. Save your HTML to a file
    This is the tricky part. Notepad normally saves files as .txt. But since you're writing HTML, you need to save the file as .htm.

If you're not careful, you'll end up with a file named something like

    filename.htm.txt

Here's how to avoid that:

  1. Click on "File" and then "Save As"
  2. Navigate to the folder you want to save in
  3. Change the "Save As Type" drop-down menu to "All Files (*.*)"
  4. Name your file, be sure to include the .htm extension e.g.
        homepage.htm

Remember HTML isn't terribly hard to learn, and you needn't buy any additional software or other items in order to put up your Web page. With Notepad, you can write complex or simple HTML and once you have learned the language, you can edit pages as quickly as someone with an expensive HTML editor.

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