TextEdit Mac issues-Can't get beyond the "01" video!

[Freedom]

I'm so sorry, really I swear I'm not this dumb usually...

 

Since I don't have "SimpleText" application on my mac, I used the newer version of it, "TextEdit", and was happily cruising through the first video of "01_build_our_first_web_page". Everything was great until I saved it as a html doc as instructed, went to view the web page through firefox, and alas, all I got was the code that I had entered in. I looked in the page source and determined that essentially that by saving the document as "html" it wrote the html code for my document, didn't recognize it as code, and simply presented the stuff that I had written as the content for my first web page. Hopefully that is all understandable. I am wondering is there a way to turn it off, so it reads my code versus creating it's own? Or something else? I looked at BBEdit as well, but before I drop $125 for it, I wanted to know if someone had the magic touch for TextEdit! Thank you!

[falkencreative]

This is a pretty common problem with TextEdit. Basically, it defaults to a rich text mode, which means that it doesn't properly interpret the text you are writing as code. Look at the last two or three posts in this topic for a fix: http://www.killersites.com/forums/topic/2422/beginners-issue-reading-html-on-a-mac/

 

Also, if you're on a budget, take a look at Smultron or TextWrangler -- both are free text editors for Mac that support things like code coloring and such. They're both a lot better to work with than TextEdit (though you could do a website in TextEdit just fine.)

[Freedom]

Thank you so much - I will happily try Smultron or Testwrangler tomorrow! And thank you so much for the link too - greatly appreciated!