



To see an illustrated, step-by-step set of instructions on how to make TextEdit do all the things I’ve just described, check out the page entitled “ How do I save HTML files from TextEdit?” at (“Vielen Dank und besten Glückwünschen!” to German resident and reader Tanya Desia for finding and pointing this little gem out to me, to help us document and solve this problem). That’s why I recommend you at least investigate Option 2 that follows, and why I use HTML-Kit on my Windows PCs when I start getting more serious about building an HTML page for which I don’t want to trot out Adobe DreamWeaver. You must, however, do this for each and every new HTML file you want to create using TextEdit (and to be fair, NotePad on Windows puts you through a similar routine for files as well, so it’s not just a crazy Mac thing it’s apparently a crazy default built-in text editor thing that is OS independent). The editor, annoyingly enough, will make you confirm this instruction, but once you surmount that final hurdle, you can use TextEdit on this file forever afterward without repeating this maneuver.
That’s because TextEdit wants to save your file in RTF (Rich Text Format) by default, and re-interpret all of your HTML markup as display characters that use character entities (like > instead of >, and < instead of Make Plain Text), and then to use the Save As… dialog (File –> Save As…) to tell the editor to save the file with a “.html” file extension.
If you want to change the behavior of TextEdit, which will otherwise keep you from creating plain text HTML files of your very own, you must jump through a few hoops. If you view source on such files in your Web browser, in fact, you’ll see a preamble at the head of every such file that looks exactly like this: Apparently, this is a default behavior of TextEdit in MacOS, which sees the HTML markup in the file and invokes a built-in software tool called the Cocoa HTML Writer. We’ve gotten email from several Mac-users about our instructions on editing HTML files to report that when they open those files inside a Web browser, they see markup instead of a bona fide Web page.
