Viewing local web pages

Question

Hello all,
I'm new to the Mac world and ran into a problem today.
I was not able to view web pages (html) that I created in Safari.
When I went to open the page in Safari all I could see was the actual html code.
Where am I supposed to put the files so they can be viewed?
Do I need to put them into a folder on apache or change their property to executable?
Thanks in advance for your input!
All the best,
Gerry

Answer 1

Gerry,
First, if you are just doing html pages, as long as you open them as a web page, they will be viewable anywhere on your computer. Open Safari, then go File->Open and navigate to your html page, but the file you open must be name with a .html extension(index.html). It should open as a web page.
Secondly if you are using any server specific languages (PHP, Ruby, etc) you need to first turn on Apache by going System Preferences->Sharing->Turn on Web Sharing
Web sites you want to view from the server need to be stored (by default, it is changeable) in /Library/WebServer/Documents (this is the root library, not your user library, so the easiest way to find this is to open a finder window and click on your boot drive icon, and scroll down to Library, the WebServer directory will not exist in your user library).
you would then open a safari window and type "http://localhost". this will load the index.html page inside the Documents directory above.
create a directory name "mySite" and put that directory in the Documents folder. Inside mySite put your hello world web page, named "index.html". Navigating with safari to "http://localhost/mySite" will fetch and serve your web page to the web browser.
Finally, there is a "sites" folder in your user directory. the url for accessing files in that directory is "http://localhost/~username" where username is your account name. This would be the default directory for iWeb, and other apple related websites that need local hosting for testing.
Jed