A Brief Introduction to Notepad
Notepad is a simple program that comes with every Windows
95/98/2000 computer. It is an editor, which means that it provides
the ability to manipulate text (cutting, pasting, etc.) much as Microsoft
Word or similar programs do. Notepad, unlike Word, can only be used to
work with "plain text" files — it doesn’t permit any formatting such as
bold/italic/underline. This limited utility, though, will be perfect for
us create Web pages — although Web pages can be quite complex when they
appear on your browser, the files that your browser uses to create those
displays are quite simple in their design. But more on that later. For
now, we'll just look at how to perform the few basic tasks Notepad allows
us.
Starting Notepad
The most foolproof way to start Notepad is click on the Start
button (at the bottom left of your screen), then select Run...
from the menu that pops up. In the small window that appears after you
select Run..., type notepad and then click the OK
button.
Using Notepad
As you can see from the lack of menus, buttons, etc., using Notepad isn't
very complicated. You can use the "cut-and-paste" feature you're
probably familiar with from using other software, but that's really about
it. That's fine, though, because all we want to deal with is "raw
text" -- we're not interested in fancy formatting, because the Web browser
will use our Web page description to set up the fancy formatting itself.
Saving Files
In fact, the only issue that might possibly take a little thought is saving
files (and even here, Notepad works like most other PC software).
The main point to keep in mind is the difference between the Save
and the Save As... commands. The first time you try to save
something you're working on, Notepad will ask you to give the file a name
and tell it what folder to put the file in. After that, whenever
you say Save, Notepad will automatically update the saved version
of the file. But what if you want to put the file somewhere else?
-- say you want to put it on a floppy disk to turn in. Then you can
choose the Save As... command, which again prompt you for a filename
and folder.
Saving HTML
The only special treatment that HTML files need is with their names.
Notepad will prefer to save your file with a name that ends in .txt
(this called the extension), but some browsers and related software
expect HTML files to end in .htm or .html, so when saving
your file, be sure to type that part in yourself -- for example, don't
just call your file hw7, but call it hw7.html.