I generally proceed like the following : In windowDidLoad method, I write only these 3 lines : NSURL *myURL = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:@"help" withExtension:@"html"]; helpContent = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:url encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil]; [self.myWebView loadHTMLString:helpContent baseURL:[url URLByDeletingLastPathComponent]];