I wrote this page in 1998 when I still had Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0. It's been nearly a decade, and the instructions are still good. The screenshots have been updated to reflect the most recent versions of Windows since then. July 2002 (XP), September 2004 (Firefox, ClearType), April 2006 (resized). I added instructions for Mac OS X in April 2006.

Making Use of Another Exotic Button on the Keyboard
Well, I've taught you most of the HTML I know. But before you leave, I want to tell you a couple more things that you might find extremely useful. First of all, if you hold down ALT, press Print Screen (still holding ALT), and then let go, you just made a snapshot of the screen (or the open window). Go to a picture editing program like Paint or Photoshop, or any program like Word or PowerPoint. Go to Edit, and Paste. You should now have a picture of the screen. Cool, huh? This is how I (used to) get a lot of my graphics for the Web. Excellent for screenshots though.

Offline Webpage Creation - The Windows Method
Did you know that you can create webpages offline? Well I figured this out by trial and error and I find it very useful. Most webpages on the Web are .html or .htm files. In fact, when you go from webpage to webpage you're actually jumping back and forth from one (usually) HTML file to another. Webpages are merely files that contain lines and lines of text, making them the same as any .txt file (Notepad text file), except that HTML files have different file extensions (.htm or .html). Your browser translates this code into text and graphics whenever it opens one of these text files with a .htm or .html extension. Because HTML files are basically text files, you can use Notepad to make an HTML file. This is how...

1. First, type the HTML code using Notepad (or a text editor of your own choosing).
2. When you're done typing all the HTML code, SAVE. A window will show up as usual. It shows UNTITLED in the small box.



3. You would usually rename it as something else. But after you type the name, type .html after it.
4. Then save.
5. You just saved it in .html format. Check the place where you saved it and it should look something like this:



6. Now join a free homepage service if you haven't done that already. The best one I've seen through all these years is GeoCities. (Edit: 2006. Or Google Page Creator). Then enter your file manager and upload HTML files and graphics into them. It's that easy.

(You can keep editing and editing your HTML file by opening it again with a text editor like Notepad and saving it. One nice thing about Internet Explorer on Windows is that you can open the HTML file with that browser, and View/Source (which opens the file in Notepad). Then you can save and refresh the page to see the changes. For other browsers like Firefox, open the HTML file with both Notepad and Firefox to achieve the same effect.)

1. First, open TextEdit. To do this, double-click the 'Macintosh HD' icon on the desktop, and then do the same for the 'Applications' icon in the window that opens. Launch TextEdit by double-clicking the icon labeled (surprise, surprise) TextEdit. The TextEdit icon will appear in your dock, as shown below.



2. When you're done typing your code, you'll want to save your text document as an HTML. and then select 'File' in the file menu (top of the screen), and select 'Save As'. A small window will appear, as shown below.



3. Replace .txt with .html (or .htm, if you'd like).
4. Click the 'Save' button. It will ask you whether you want to append .txt to your somefilename.html file. Choose 'Don't Append'.



5. And you're done! The HTML file you've just saved will look this (in the folder of your choice).