ASCII Format

If you can open up the file in a text editor and you see text, rather than gibberish, then you have an ASCII file. ASCII files are made up only of letters, numbers, and punctuation, rather than the binary bits used for executable files. When you create an HTML file in a pure text editor such as Notepad, the file is always in ASCII format. However, if you use a word processor such as Microsoft Word, the program introduces some weird, non-ASCII information. For this reason, never use any word processor to create HTML files.