CS 100 (Learn) — CS 100 (Web) — Module 07

HTML :: WYSIWYG vs. Text Editors

You may be familiar with Microsoft Word, a popular word processor.

Microsoft Word is what is known as a WYSIWYG editor: What You See Is What You Get.

When you bold text in Microsoft Word, the text appears bolded on the screen, and when you insert a picture into a document, you can see the picture.

WYSIWYG editors are great tools, but they intentionally hide and obscure much of the formatting (or the markup language) that is used.

For the next few modules, you should not be using a WYSIWYG editor. Instead, you should be using what is known as a plain text editor.

Both Windows and Mac are equipped with plain text editors, but there are alternative editors that you can download that are easier to use and more powerful. Windows has Notepad, but a much better alternative is Notepad++. Mac OSX has TextEdit, but a much better alternative is BBEdit.

File Extensions

You will want to generate files with an .html file extension (e.g., "hello.html").

Some text editors may try to add an additional .txt at the end of your files so you may end up with awkwardly named file such as "hello.html.txt". This problem may be compounded if your operating system is hiding the file extensions of your files. If your operating system is hiding the extensions of your files, simply google "how to show file extensions on a pc" or "how to show file extensions on a mac" to change this behaviour.