Windows "New HTML Document" Template

The 32 bit versions of the the Windows operating system provide for file templates to be created by selecting the "File > New" menu selection in Explorer or My Computer. If you create HTML documents by hand, this can be useful, to save some of the drudge work of typing in the tags that will be there in most of the documents created, serving as reminders of the correct syntax, and so forth. The default document created by selecting "HTML Document" is pretty sparse, however, it only has beginning and ending HTML tags, like this:

So I made this more detailed one to use as the default:

On Windows NT the appropriate place for all these "File > New" default files is the C:/WinNT/ShellNew/ directory, and the one used for HTML Document is usually called netscape.html if you have configured the Netscape browser on your machine. Open that file in a text editor such as Notepad, and copy and paste the text from the table above into it, and from then on all files you create with the "File > New > HTML Document" menu selection will start out that way.

Here are what some of the less commonly encountered lines mean.

• META NAME="description" - Short description of the page contents. Used by some web directories and search engines in indexing the page.
• META NAME="keywords" - Useful words relevant to the page content. Again, used by some web search engines in indexing the page. Directories usually don't.
• META NAME="author" - Creator of the page. Just for human interest.
• META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" - Character set the page is written in. Used by the web browser to determine how to display the page. Especially useful if not the ISO Latin character set, default setting for many users.
• <!--#geoguide--> - GeoGuide comment. This is used by GeoCities, my free web host, to display their advertisement in a specific area of the page, instead of as a hovering box or pop-up window. No meaning if not on GeoCities.