Hello again! Well, we covered in the last two lessons, some current items (SysOp Arrest
and The Internet's most wanted), now onward we go. This week we cover a topic that may be
of interest to may users. Thus this week's lesson may be found in more that the usually
circle of Cyber Havens (hmm...remember that word "HAVEN"
Read on...
The WEB as it is affectiontely know as, was developed by the Center For European Nuclear Research (CERN) ,based in Geneva Switzerland. To access it you need to access a server (one storage area for other systems (clients) to access. ). You able to access documents yet while inside one documents. As you are reading you will notice certain words highlighted. By clicking or highlighting these keywords you may find youself Cyber-Transported to one of the following:
1) Another Document of information
2) Another WWW Site
3) A FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Site (remember our FTP lesson?)
4) A UseNet Newsgroup
5) A GIF picture
6) A Gopher Site
7) A Telnet Site
8) Archie
9) Z39.50 servers
10) Embedded Sound
The ability to do all of this is know as the technology of Hypermedia. Of course this is a document. The main difference is that you will have to imput codes so that when the information is displayed it will peform the task that you desire. Consider it like, editing with a word processor in which you must actually put in code so that the final document will show bold face or underlining where you request it. Editing your WWW document has a language of it own, and very similar to the technology of Hypermedia, it is called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
It is important to note that in the list of 1 to 10 above the more complex items are covered as we are looking at WWW in a extended version to allow for multimedia. This extended version is commonly know as MOSAIC. Herein we have formatted text,fonts,embedded sound,etc. It has been noted that he real potential has barely been looked at. The mediums (Mosaic Clients) available for viewing all this great stuff are availble for X (xmosaic), Windows and Mac (MacMosaic). Mac and Unix servers exist.
I would assume if your are looking for the big time, you want to run your own WWW site. This is availble vi the NCSA's Unix HTTPd server via FTP:ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the Mosaic/ncsa_httpd area. A Mactintosh HTTP server would also be found via FTP: sumex-aim.standford.edu in the info-mac/comm directory.
Back to HTML. If you create documents in what is called Framemaker or Rich Text Format (RTF) these documents can be converted to HTML. For Framemaker try FTP:info.cern.ch in the pub/www/src directory. For RTF EMAIL: cjh@cray.com for the rtftohtml program, which text and styles with pictures saved seperately and cross referenced.
In HTML creation remember, that the embedded codes or TAGS as they have been referred to often required a beginning and ending. So a beginning title tag "
" tag. Notice both TAGS are similar with the exception of the slash "/". A cheat sheet, as I like to call it, would be as follows:
"title" Title of Document (required ending)
"h1" First level header (up to 6 h1,h2,etc.) (ending)
End of paragraph (no ending)
"a" Links to other locations (ending)
As mentioned earlier we may want to embedd special codes to provide functions as follows (less then beginning and greater than ending signs omitted:
Global Link "a href="full URL address">Highlighted Word(s)>
Gopher "a href="gopher://address/">Highlight
Newsgroup "a href="news:name of group">Highlight
GIF to Global Link "a href="full URL">greater sign"img src=file.gif"less sign
Well that raps this lesson, as always, hoping your Cyber-Travels as Good ones!
Our Tip of the week:
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Where do you get Mosaic for FREE?
Answer.
Gopher or FTP at for the following Systems at these locations:
X-Windows: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/binaries/2.4/
Windows 3.1: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/wmos20a7.zip
Mac 68K: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Mac/NCSAMosaicA6.68k.hqx
Power Mac: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Mac/NCSAMosaicA6.PPC.hqx
Windows (32bit) ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/win32s.zip
P.S.
An Internet Provider I am currently using can be reached at: (800) 669-4780 Internet Online Services