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Saving your masterpiece

Saving is a tricky area, and it helps if you know what you're doing on a computer for this part. But even if you don't, do not fret; I'll explain the process thoroughly.

You need to give your document a file-extension, to tell your computer what type of file this is. You are editing the page in a text-editor (at least, you should be), which saves in the format .txt (TeXT file) . You have written some text, and you want a file that is in the .html format. So click File | Save As... Find the place on your hard drive where you want to keep all your pages (I would recommend you create a new folder and keep all of your documents together). Then in the box labelled 'save as type' change it to 'all files *.*'. This means that you can save the data (in this case, some text) into any format. So, now name your file wikid.html and click save. Finito.

After you have done this once, if you ever change your code, you only need to press save, not save as, because the computer now knows this is a html file.

Your page's filename can consist of any combination of letters, numbers or _ and - characters. It is a good practice to start the filename with a letter and use lowercase letters at all times. This will make sure that few capitalisation-caused errors will occur by people trying to type your page's address into their browser. You should call your homepage index.html — this will be important later on.

Question: how come I see some pages named 'something.htm'?

Well, before more recent operating systems like Windows 95, file extensions were limited to only three letters, hence htm. You could name all your files using .htm as the suffix, but there are so few people with OSs that old that you're probably better off just using .html and being done with it. And for God's sake, don't mix and match. Stick with one format for your entire site.

Note to users of word processors

If you're using something like Word or WordPerfect to make your pages (which is a really bad idea), you don't want to be saving all of the editor's values for margins and formatting etc. when you save your html file, as they can't be read by your browser. So when saving your file, make sure to save it as text-only, and only the things useful to your browser will get saved.