How do italicize attributes on a Mac?

<i> </i> around your attributes. Are you in a code challenge?

I'm coding in TextEdit. On the Treehouse video, it shows attributes like lang and charset in italics. But I can't get my Mac to just italicize individual characters. It wants to italicize the whole document. And the links aren't rendering correctly in my browser.

Here is my code, followed by the error message I get when I try to view it in my browser:

<a> href=“index.html”>Go Back</a>

Here is the error message:

href=“index.html”>Go Back

You have a closing bracket on your first <a

it should read: <a href="index.html">Go Back</a>

If you wanted the Go Back text in italics it would look like this:

<a href="index.html"><i>Go Back</i></a>

But to answer your initial question, no italics are not necessary.

The italics you're seeing in the video (and the colors too) aren't really a part of the code — this is called syntax highlighting. TextEdit doesn't do this as it wasn't designed for editing code, but TextMate (the editor shown in the video) and many other editors have this feature. By displaying different parts of the code in different colors and formatting, it's easier to skim through lots of code quickly and notice small errors.

In your code there are two errors. First of all, as Robyn mentioned, there is an extra right angle bracket after your <a. Second, the quotation marks around index.html are curly/smart quotes like “this” instead of "this". Recent versions of Mac OS X do this automatically in TextEdit, so I'd recommend using a different text editor such as Brackets or Sublime Text, which have many features that will help when writing code.

Eureka -- it works now! Thank you so much, Milo and Robyn!