Delphinidin

To write CSS, just as is the case when writing HTML source, you will need a text editor. Word processing programs such as Microsoft Word aren’t ideally suited for CSS, because they automatically do lots of things that are helpful when writing a letter or book, such as correct spelling but get in the way when writing code. Instead, you want something that doesn’t make any changes that you don’t want to what you type but lets you write and save plain text.

The Windows Notepad program is one example of a text editor that is ideal for composing source code. To launch Notepad, choose Start > Run and then type Notepad in the Open textbox. On Mac OS X, the Notepad equivalent is TextEdit, which can be found in the Mac OS X Applications folder.

There are more advanced text editors that will do useful things such as color your code so that it is clear which parts do what (this is known as syntax highlighting) or automatically complete code for you when you’ve started typing.

Editors available for Windows include:
+ Notepad++: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/ (free)
+ Crimson Editor: www.crimsoneditor.com (free)
+ HTML-kit: www.chami.com/html-kit (free)

And here are some alternative text editors that work with Mac OS X:
+ TextWrangler: www.barebones.com (free)
+ TextMate: http://macromates.com/ (retail with 30 day free trial)
+ You can find more text editors suitable for CSS and HTML at http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/List_of_HTML_editors

In addition, there is the very popular Adobe Dreamweaver (www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver), which combines a text editor with a WYSIWYG (or What You See Is What You Get) code generator, which lets you use a graphical interface to create web pages in HTML and CSS.

You must create HTML files with the .html extension. If you use Notepad or TextEdit, beware of your files being saved with a .txt extension, which will not result in a web browser interpreting your file as ordinary text rather than HTML.

To ensure that your files are saved properly on Windows, choose Start > Run and type Explorer (or right-click Start and choose Explore from the pop-up menu) to open Windows Explorer. After Windows Explorer is open, choose Tools > Folder Options to open the Folder Options window, click the View tab, and uncheck the Hide Extensions for Known File Types box. Then click OK.

On Mac OS X, open Finder, and go to Finder > Preferences. Select the Advanced tab, and check the box for Show All File Extensions.