On a Mac, I created a file with some very simple html, e.g. <h1>my web page</h1> I save it as .html. I start firefox or Opera and I use open file, but I just see the content as html source, e.g. I see <b> tags, etc.
If you want all the code here it is:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My Web Page</h1>
</body>
</html>
Edit: ‘Rich text’ format was the issue. See my answer below.
Shad was actually on to the right answer here.
The problem was that I was using the standard mac text editor –
textedit– and it was saving the document type as rich text formatting (the standard). I had to go into textedit preferences and make change the default formatting for a new document from Rich text to Plain text. This fixed the problem!As this was a stupid problem, yet not obvious to most I’ll post the screen shot of where you change that default new document preference in textedit prefs.