Question about HTML files using TextEdit

Question

First off, I wanted to ask if this is the proper place to post a question about HTML/XHTML. I couldn't really find anywhere else that seemed to fit better, but please point me in the right direction if this is not the place. Thanks.
Moving on -- here's my question:
I'm having trouble with working with HTML files in TextEdit. I'm on a Mac, using TextEdit as my HTML editor (I can not afford one of these other HTML editors, and I like using a simple text editor like TextEdit for HTML). Here's my problem: I open a new rich text document in TextEdit and write my HTML and then choose File>Save As and choose "HTML" under the File Format drop-down box. Having saved this file as an HTML file, I then open Safari and choose File>Open File and select my HTML file; however, when I do this, my web page's text does not appear in the browser window. Instead, the HTML code itself appears in the browser window, as if the browser was not interpreting it as HTML and converting it. The same problem happens when saving the file as a .htm file using Microsoft Word for Mac.
So, as another solution (at the suggestion of a helpful poster in a previous thread), I tried creating a plain text file in TextEdit (instead of a rich text file like before). Now, in TextEdit there is no option for saving plain text files as HTML files, so I simply save it as a Unicode-8 format and then find the file in Finder and change the extension to .htm myself (I've tried .html as well). This, fortunately enough, actually works! When I open the file in Safari I get to see my web page as expected. However, the first time I quit out of the application TextEdit and then try to reopen my .htm file in TextEdit, I no longer can see my HTML code. Instead, TextEdit shows me the actual web page text that I would expect to see when I open the file in a browser, and my HMTL code is lost.
Can someone please help me here? There has to be a way to edit HTML in TextEdit without the code disappearing every time you quit out of the application and reopen the HTML file. Any help is greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

That's the problem -- once I convert it to plain text there is no longer an HTML option under the Save As drop down menu. The drop down menu's title is Plain Text Encoding instead of File Format and the only options I get are Unicode-8, Unicode-16, Western, Chinese, and so forth. I can save it as an HTML file, but only if the file is rich text, which doesn't work for HTML.
So, I can save it as plain text (.txt) and then go and change the extension myself, and like I said, it works if I do that. I can edit HTML in TextEdit and open the file properly in Safari to view my web page. The problem is (I went over all this in my first post) that, after that, if I exit TextEdit and reopen it, my document is no longer HTML code -- it is now simply the text of the web site as if I had opened it in a broswer.
What do you suggest I do?