This the last of my MacChooser columns, the second of two articles on the World Wide Web. After a few months break MacChooser was now very different from previous issues, slimmer and with a new look. In this issue my column took on a third name, 'Mac Online'

Putting Yourself on the Web

The two questions I'm most often asked about the World Wide Web (the WWW or Web for short) are "How do I access it ?" and "How do I put myself on it ?". Last issue I tried to answe the first of these questions, so it's only fair that I now tackle the second.

The Web has seen phenomenal growth in recent months, outpacing even the exponential growth of the Internet, which has been doubling in size every few months. In two years the Web has come from almost nowhere to become perhaps the most popular, and certainly the most talked about and, way of using the Internet.

Once you get onto the Web it becomes obvious why it is so popular - it the first, and so far the only, graphical front end for the Internet. All other Internet resources, such as e-mail, news, telnet, gopher and ftp, are text based, originally designed to work on terminals connected to machines running a command-line OS dsuch as UNIX.

Getting started.

A vital element in the Web's success has been the ease with which individuals can set up pages on it. Compared to setting up a mailing list or creating a news group, putting yourself on the Web is relatively easy: so much so that if you have an account with a commercial internet service provider, and have access to the Web thorugh your account, then you probably already have all you need to put yourself on the Web.

Before you do anything towards this you should spend as many hours as possible exploring the Web, browsing sites and pages and becoming familar with the resources avaiable on the Web. This will let you discover for yourself what is possible on the Web, and give you ideas of what you could achieve yourself. In particular many guides to creating Web documents can be found on the Web, ranging from simple how-to guides to comprehensive, detailed manuals on all aspects of Web page creation.

In particular you should spend time looking at and downloading pages from the Web, using your browser's "View Source" or "Save As..." commands to view and save copies of a variety of documents, in particular those that stand out or use the Web to good effect. These will be a valuable source of examples and ideas when you start creating your own Web documents.

Note that all files on the Web follow the UNIX naming convention of file_name.ext, where "file_name" is the name of the file and the extension ".ext" gives the file type. These extensions are used by Web browsers to determine what sort of file is being loaded and what action neds to be taken to deal with it, and you should follow the same conventions when you create your own documents for uploading.

HTML

To describe the Web as graphical is perhaps a bit misleading. Although it stands out on the Internet because of it's graphical capabilities, the building blocks of the Web are really hyper-text documents, documents where clicking on a highlighted word or phrase takes you to another part of the document or a different document. But while previous hyper-text systems have been designed to guide you through a document or set of documents on a disk, the links in a Web document can be to any other Web document, anywhere in the world - hence the name the World Wide Web.

These hyper-text documents are more properly called HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) documents. HTML uses tags embedded within the text to specify all formatting and links to other documents. This is probably clearest with an example, so see here for an example of HTML, and here for the document it produces.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>An Example Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2 ALIGN=CENTER>An Example Page</H2>
This is an example of a HTML document. It includes examples of
formatting, such as <B>Bold</B> and <I>Italic</I>, as well as
a <A HREF="home.html">link</A> to another page.
<HR>
<ADDRESS>johnb@hk.super.net</ADDRESS></BODY></HTML>

The example includes formatting tags (<B>, <I>; <H1 ...>, <HR> and <ADDRESS>), structural tags (<HTML>, <HEAD>, <TITLE> and <BODY>) and a link (<A ...>) to another document. Most tags are placed at the start of the block of text they apply to, with a closing tag, typically the same but including a forward slash, at the end of the block.

If you can understand the above then you can create World Wide Web documents. Using any text or word processor -- even SimpleText -- you can either create a Web document from scratch, putting in the necessary tags as you go, or take an existing document and insert tags to convert it to HTML.

But while this might work for a simple document such as this, in a longer more complex document it can become much difficult to manage the document and keep track of tags used. Luckily you no longer need to create HTML documents by hand - in the last twelve months a number of utilities and applications have appeared that take much of the work out of HTML creation.

Most are HTML editors, i.e. text editors that also understand HTML, and can add tags, check existing HTML and allow easy previewing of the finished document. One of the best is HTML SuperText, a freeware program which can be found on most Mac ftp sites, as well as on other online services. Other tools are designed to work with existing applications, and are useful if you are happiest working with such appications. Two I have used are Translator, which will work with any XTND capable application such as ClarisWorks or MacWrite, and the HTML Extensions for the excellent text editor BBEdit.

Most of these are either freeware or shareware, and so are easy to find and to try out, but making them not as mature or capable as commercial tools and applications. And with HTML changing so quickly even the best of them cannot keep up with the latest additions to HTML.

Because of this the best approach is often to use a combination of tools, e.g. use HTML conversion tool to convert existing documents to HTML, an HTML editor to quickly create HTML tagged text, and a standard word processor or text editor to add any HTML features the tools do not understand.

Graphics

Earlier I described the Web as a graphical front end to the Internet., so in addition to the formatting, structural and linking tags, tags are used to indicate where graphics will appear in a Web document. The format for these "image" tags is <IMG SRC="image.gif">, where "image.gif" is the name of the file which will replace the tag when the HTML file is loaded (as long as it is the same directory as the HTML file).

The most popular graphics format on the Web is GIF, also called CompuServe GIF, a compressed format, developed especially for online services as it produces small files, even for large images as long as the design is not too complex. But GIF files are limited to at most 256 colours, and the format is slowly being replaced by JPEG, which stores 24 bits of colour information and has a more flexible compression scheme.

Both formats are supported by all major graphics applications, though if you do not want to invest in a commercial program there are a number of cheaper conversion programs, such as the shareware application GIFConverter or postcard-ware application JPEGView, which can convert between GIF, JPEG and PICT as well as other Mac and PC formats.

Uploading

Once you have created your HTML pages, together with any graphics which will be included, and have checked them with one or more browsers, it is time to put them online. How you do this depends on exactly how your access provider has configured their server, but the proceedure I have to follow on HK Supernet is probably typical of other service providers.

After connecting with SLIP or PPP I launch Fetch and open an FTP connection to the server where my home directory is (is1.hk.super.net). I use Fetch to create a directory, "public_html", in my home directory. and to send the FTP command "SITE CHMOD 755 public_html" to the server, to tell it to open up this directory to public access. I then open this directory, and upload any files I want to put online, making sure to upload HTML documents as text and other files as raw data files.

Once this is done the files are available for all the world to see. For example my files on Supernet can be accessed by anyone using a URL such as:

http://www.hk.super.net/~johnb/home.html

where "www.hk.super.net" is the name of the server, "johnb" is my account on Supernet and "home.html" is a file I have uploaded.

This has only been a brief guide to putting yourself on the World Wide Web. More comprehensive guides to the HTML language, page design, Web file formats, the programs and utilities you can use can be found on the Web. But I hope this is enough to at least give you some idea of what you need to do, and of how easy it can be to put yourself on the Web.

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