egafd.com

If you use Notepad it will be saved as a text file and it will be compatable with all platforms and programs. The potential downside is there will be no formatting included except line breaks so you wont be able to emphasise or bold things for example. However, bearing in mind it will be transferred to HTML this shouldn't make any difference.

By default Wordpad uses a doc extension which is Microsoft Word again and this can cause some compatibility issues especially with older word processors and Unix or Linux machines.

Sorry if this is all irrelevant but I have finally found a topic I can write about with some degree of competence!!

is it ok to use notepad but include html tags?

bold
italic
underline

Notepad and my other computer don't like each other. They use different conventions for line breaks and carriage returns - so I might not know where you want to start a new paragraph. Just save as plain text with a txt extension from Wordpad or Word. Don't put in any html tags as there's no need and they'll be lost anyway. If you send a word file it will go into my document processor as text but this will include all the font information, and unless recent versions have improved, all corrections you have made will be stuck at the end. So plain text. I can't anticipate any need to use bold or italic, except very rarely for emphasis, but that's going to get lost anyway as I send a text file to Phil. If you must emphasize use CAPS and it can be changed later. Underline is very bad DTP practice anyway, a hangover from the days of typewriters mistakenly (in my view) resurrected on the web.

....the underline on typewriters was always supposed to represent italics, wasn't it?
For historical info only......

Yes.