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How to do your work

1. First, yes first, make a file folder on the computer or on a computer disk for your work. Do not skip this step or you will waste lots of time later trying to find pages and images. If you use a Mac, it is obvious how to make a new folder. If you use a PC with Windows, right click on the "Start" button and select "Explore." When the Explore page opens up highlight either the "C:" for your hard drive or "A:" for a floppy disk. Then go to "File" in the top toolbar and select "New> Folder" to create the folder. Give it a name you can remember.

2. Next, open up "Notepad" in Windows or "Simple Text" in Mac. (In Windows, make sure you use "Notepad" and not the "Wordpad". You will also have problems if you try to write your code using a word processing program like "Word" or "Word Perfect." These add html tags when you save with the "html" extension. It will get in the way of your tags.)

3. Type your html code on the notepad.When finished, you must save it with the extension ".htm" (or ".html" for Mac) to see the results on your browser. Do not save your work as a text file with a ".txt" extension or it will not work in the browser correctly.

By the way, this is one reason you need to create that file folder in step 1—save you file in that folder so you can find it to load in the browser. You can also temporarily save your file onto the desk top, but you will not want to do that when you are working with many pages.

4. Make the Notepad or SimpleText window smaller so that it takes up less than half the screen.

5. Open your browser and reduce its window so that it also takes up less than half the screen.

Web Version

screen with notepad and browser

(This graphic shows a computer screen; the Notepad is opened on the left and the browser opened on the right.)

6. Open your html file in the browser. There are several ways to do this:

Click "Open" in Netscale and then use the browse button to find your file in the folder or on the desktop;
Click "Open File" (not "Open Location") in Explorer and browse to find your file;
Find the icon for your file and double-click to force it to open in your default browser; or
Drag the icon for your html file and drop it onto the browser icon or in the address window of the open browser.

7. On a Windows machine, if you right-click on the time in the lower right-hand of the screen, and then select "tile vertically", the Notepad and Browser will fill your screen so you can type in one and see the results in the other. Each time you make a change, "Save" the change on the Notepad and then "Refresh" or "Reload" the page in your browser.

8. To submit homework, you will post the html page you have done on your web site.

Note. If you are used to using an html editor such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, please attempt using the "html view" to handcode. Also, if you use an html editor, take out as much unnecessary proprietary code and add comment tags to explain why codes are used.