Create an HTML file in NotePad++
You can skip this page if you're already using NotePad++. It's just a short practice to
show you some of the features of the editor.
Open NotePad++ and type the web page listed below into the blank
document that appears.
<html>
<!-- This is my first web page -->
<head>
<title>
My first web page
</title>
</head>
<body>
This text will appear on the page.
</body>
</html>
NotePad++ will colour-code your program as soon as it knows what language you're
writing. Save the file with an html extension and NotePad++ will realise that
you are typing HTML. It will colour-code your text like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>
My first web page
</title>
</head>
<body>
This text will appear on the page.
</body>
</html>
The text to be displayed stays black but the tags become blue and the comments
become green.
Colour-coding may sound a childish feature but it is very useful. If you type a tag
and it stays black then you know you've made a mistake. If you forget to close a
comment then the rest of the page will go green. Try it. You need to know what
NotePad++ will do when you make mistakes later.
Later on you will see that NotePad++ will also colour code JavaScript in a similar
way.
If you experiment with the text in the editor you will find that matching HTML tags
are highlighted automatically. Click on the
<body>
tag and both it and the
</body>
tag will be highlighted in blue. This too is trivial in a simple program but becomes
invaluable when you have dozens of tags nested inside one another.
The lines of HTML in this example have been indented to show how they fit into the
structure of the page. This is not compulsory, just a matter of programming style to
make the page easier to understand. Indents are straightforward in NotePad++, you
write the lines as normal, select all the lines you want to indent then press Tab. Use
Shift+Tab to unindent blocks of lines.
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