Please be gentle. Please be gentle. Please be gentle.
<deep breath>
Ok, I'm brand new to web design. Ive been through the w3schools site and am pouring over my "Building Websites for Dummies" Books (both the Sahlin/Snell all-in-one second edition AND the Crowther versions) but cannot seem to find an answer to this most basic of problems:
When coding HTML, what program do I write it in, and what file format (ie extention) do I save it in?
Ive written some very basic intro stuff in MSWord and Wordpad (Windows VISTA 32) , then saved in .HTM, .HTML, .RTF, and .TXT formats - yet I get the same problem - when I open them in any browser (IE9, Chrome 17, Firefox 3 or Opera 11) the document appears exactly as written - HTML tags & all. When I view the source there appears to be a huge amount of extra HTML code automatically added.
What am I doing wrong? What should I be doing? Please help!