In MS IE, if I have a quick fix to a web page, I open the local copy, click on “View > Source” and MS IE opens the page in Notepad. I change the HTML, save, then FTP the updated page to the host. How do I do that on a Mac?
I recently volunteered to help a friend create a web site. She uses a Mac. I have never used a Mac. She has never written HTML.
So far what we;ve been doing is opening the HTML in the Apple version of “Word”, creating or changing, saving as text with line breaks and renaming page.txt to page.html. This is awkward. It is especially awkward if, for instance, I typed “liek” instead of “like” on the page, or left one “/” out of the href tag.
I know HTML. I will not use Front Page and I can’t afford Dream Weaver. I just want to know what the Mac equivalent of “Notepad” is, and how to hook it up to the “View > Source”.
Apple Help, from what I’ve seen, is just as hopeless and frustrating as Microsoft help. Neither one helps much unless you can guess EXACTLY what phrase will unlock the How-to wizard.
My thanks to you all. You may phrase your answer as if I had never touched a Mac without fear of offending me. They are wonderful machines; I’ve just never used one.
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Edit:
I would prefer not to have to open an HTML editor, then open the local page. My friend is leery of downloads. I will if I have to, though.
How do I use Simple text? As I said, I’m a COMPLETE novice. I didn’t see anything labeled “Text” in the list of progarms except “Text Edit” or “Text Pad” (I have forgotten which.) Is that “Simple text”?
Thanks again.
I would suggest BBedit. But if you go to Softpedia.com and search for free HTML editors on a mac, tons come up…read ratings and reviews, and pick one.
Remember you can always use Simple Text.
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The only way you can really edit a webpage online is through FTP or downloading and re-uploading a .html file. You have to open that in an editor, or simple text (which is the equivalent to note pad on the pc – just a text editor…
I use dreamweaver to write my code – I’m just used to it so it works for me. There are a ton of tools out there. But yes, you need to download it. The ONLY way you can edit an html page directly through your browser is if the site has a Content Management System (CMS) developed with it. Hope that makes sense to you.
Hey, I understand what you mean — I’m a web designer who has been using a Mac for a year now and at first I wasn’t sure what program to use either. But now, the program I use is TextWrangler. It is amazing and I swear by it. You can download it here: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
TextWrangler is in my opinion better than BBEdit, plus with a name like “Text Wrangler”, how can you resist? LOL. You can set TextWrangler to be the default program for HTML and CSS files. To do this, go to “View Source” and then “Save page as” as you normally would. Then, navigate to the saved source HTML file. Right-click it. Then choose “View Info.” There should be a header somewhere in the window that pops up called “Open with” or “Opens in”…and a drop down menu under that. Select “Text Wrangler” from that menu. If it doesn’t show up, there will be an option at the bottom for you to search your Applications/programs folder for it. Once you select Text Wrangler, click the “Make default for all” button underneath the drop-down menu (the wording on this button may be slightly different, I don’t remember what it is in English because I’ve set the language of my computer to Danish for the time being, haha).
For FTP, you can use CyberDuck. It’s a great FTP client for Mac, and TextWrangler integrates right into it. http://cyberduck.ch/
You can open up an HTML or CSS file right in Cyberduck (if you have access to the server) and it’ll open directly in TextWrangler, and then when you hit APPLE+S (the Mac version of CTRL+S), it’ll automatically upload the new version to the server. Cool huh?!
Good luck!
P.S. Both TextWrangler and CyberDuck are free, but I just wanted to bring your attention to another nifty program that I use, called CSS Edit. It also integrates into CyberDuck and it makes editing CSS files a breeze. However it is not free (but not too expensive). It’s worth checking out: http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/