Author Archives: Ed Tittel

Mac Users: Beware TextEdit “File Save…” issue

OK, it’s official. We’ve gotten email from several Mac-users about our instructions on editing HTML files to report that when they open those files inside a Web browser, they see markup instead of a bona fide Web page. Apparently, this is a default behavior of TextEdit in MacOS, which sees the HTML markup in the file and invokes a built-in software tool called the Cocoa HTML Writer. If you view source on such files in your Web browser, in fact, you’ll see a preamble at the head of every such file that looks exactly like this:
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When troubleshooting HTML markup, use validator.w3.org

This morning, I got an e-mail from one of our readers saying that she’d entered the text from one of our examples exactly as it appeared in the book, but that the page didn’t look or behave at all correctly. As I do whenever I get such an e-mail from a reader I replied with “Please send me the file so I can look it over.” Shortly thereafter I plucked it from my inbox and gave it the hairy eyeball.

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The (Occasional) Trouble with Cross-Platform Development

When we brought the site up live about two weeks ago, one of the first things we did was to post the “master ZIP file,” which contains all the source code, graphics, CSS, and so forth, for all of the examples in this latest edition of our book. Jeff and I both tested the file, and it unpacked perfectly on our various test machines so we figured “Problem solved. We’re good to go!” Not quite…

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