I am new to the Mac world and I have started with Tiger. When I use the textedit program to type HTML code and save it as an HTML document all I see is the code when I open the file in any of the browsers that I use. Unlike Notepad in Window, why can’t I see the results of my code in a web page? I am completely lost and have combed the Internet. The simple Text Editor program in the older versions of the Mac OSs’ seemed to work just like Notepad in Windows. Please let me know what I am doing wrong.

Just as with NotePad on the PC, there’s a bit of a trick to getting TextEdit to save HTML files properly, and it’s all to do with the filename extension.

Yes, we’re now deep into the 21st Century, but computer operating systems still basically work like early DOS machines: If you have the wrong filename extension, either your OS itself won’t understand it or your Web browser will be convinced that even though it looks like HTML inside it’s really just plain text to show as-is.

Sheesh.

In TextEdit, you’ll type in some HTML and have a window that looks like this…