Creating a New Web Page

You don't need any special tools to create a Web page. You can use any word processor, even WordPad or TextEdit, which are included with the basic Windows and Macintosh system software.

Tips

If you like Microsoft Word, you can use it for writing (X)HTML too. Just be sure to save the file correctly (as text-only and with the .htm or .html extension). For more details, see pages 46 48.
If you use Dreamweaver, or some other Web page editor to start your pages, you can still tweak the (X)HTML code by hand. Just choose File > Open from your text editor of choice and open the file. Then use the rest of this book to add your own (X)HTML tags and create the (X)HTML page you want.
You can use TextEdit or WordPad, but if you want to get fancy, try BBEdit for Mac or HTML-Kit for Windows. Both display (X)HTML tags in color, and have powerful search and replace functions, syntax checkers for debugging problematic pages, and assorted other helpful features. For more details, consult (X)HTML Editors on page 434.

Creating a New Web Page

Figure 2.2. Open your text editor or word processor and choose File > New. (Shown are TextEdit for Macintosh at left and WordPad for Windows on the right.)

Figure 2.3. On a Macintosh, you can use Text-Edit to write the (X)HTML code for your page.

Figure 2.4. This is WordPad, one of the programs Windows users can use to create (X)HTML pages.