Resources for Web pages

If you've not been in a coma for the past two years you will have heard of the World Wide Web: it's been widely mentioned in newspapers &c.. Most of you will have played around with a Web browser, such as Netscape, and will be aware that the lab has its own Web server. It's easy to add your own documents to the files on this server, which is distinct from KATI, the Lab's main file server (although the two servers are connected through the net).

The Web is a new medium: putting up Web pages can best be thought of as publishing in this medium, much as you would do if you wrote a journal article or made a documentary. It has its own conventions, and you must respect these if your work is understood, but the primary problem facing you is universal: guessing the audience that will view your pages.

Practice using an editor (HoTMetaL recommended). Practice converting images into suitable formats. Assemble the documents & images in a normal directory on one of the servers (or on a local disk such as C:). Ask Martin for a special Web directory (this can be either on KATI or tree: everyone on tree will shortly get one by default). Put your pages there, and check them.

	There are two divergent approaches to creating Web pages. You can follow standards as closely as possible & have your pages look reasonable in a range of different browsers (possibly including text-only browsers such as Lynx), or you can aim for an attractive visual design, although this may hide your pages from people with browsers that can't handle the methods used to produce your design. For the first approach you can use the canonical source of the latest recommended HTML standard, <URL:http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-html32.html>, but this is a rather terse technical summary; there's a similar document at <URL:http://www.sandia.gov/sci_compute/html_ref.html>, a tutorial introduction (albeit still for people who already understand some HTML) at <URL:http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/>, & another reference guide with some background information at <URL:http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/>.
	One of the most prolific & outspoken advocates of the visual design approach to Web page construction is David Seigel, who has one set of recommendations at <URL:http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/index.html>, but this is just a part of a huge collection of his writings & designs. For a slightly more restrained approach (and some very useful links to other resources), see Joe Gillespie's site <URL:http://ds.dial.pipex.com/pixelp/wpdesign/wpdintro.htm>, & for more information about the best use of color on Web pages (particularly graphs & figures) see some of Lynda Weinman's examples on <URL:http://www.Lynda.com/> (that's where I obtained the color chart that sits next to my grayscale monitor to let me know how our pages will appear to other people).
	These approaches don't have to be mutually exclusive. With care you can design pages that are visually appealing in advanced browsers, but nevertheless can display useful information to people who can't use them (remember that students who can't afford the hardware & connection fees to run Netscape at home may be viewing your pages using Lynx from the U.Arizona.EDU machines). One possible solution is to make the home page of a group of pages something fairly generic, but then offer multiple version (e.g., with Java applets or frames) which people can choose if they want. There's a trick we can now do here that lets you share fragments of documents among a set of Web pages with different display conventions (these are what are known as server side includes). If the first page people see uses applets or frames, it may appear completely blank, even to some quite advanced browsers (e.g., look at a frame-based page with the latest Amaya browser instead of Netscape). Also, don't assume that Netscape can display all the potentially useful features of a page; in one very important respect, the handling of what are called style sheets, the currently released version is far behind the latest HTML standard (a pity, because style sheets remove the need for many of the ugly tricks that have been the resort of designers trying to produce relatively simple font and layout changes).
	Finally, I must stress the importance of testing your design at various stages of construction. Don't assume because it looks good with a particular browser on a particular machine that it will appear that way to everyone, but check it with various different displays & browsers. Check your HTML for errors by submitting parts of your pages to syntax checking sites: one I have used is Web Techs' validation service at <URL:http://www.Webtechs.com/html-val-svc/>, but there are several others to choose from; do a final check on the URLs for your pages when they're complete. However this won't reveal problems in things that fall outside the syntax of the document, such as badly dithered color figures (then there's the spelling used in the text of your pages, but some validators will even check this).