I'm guessing your "text edit" didn't store it as plain text to begin with, so the extra symbols are file metadata/headers. Changing the file extension instead of just saving as HTML to begin with exposed the additional data (which shouldn't be present in an HTML file and caused it to break in Chrome).
I suggest trying to create the file again
TextMate[
^] (Mac users tell me it's good for this kind of thing), and save it as an HTML file directly.