Get Wired - SFU ENSC on the 'Net

How To Write Home Pages

By John Harvey, VP Geek Electronic Communications

Home pages are written in a language called HTML. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a text file with "tags" added. A tag is a command surrounded by greater than and less than symbols. An example of a command is:

<Center>

The case is not relevant. The more tags you know, the neeter the things you can do. So what are the tags? That's the catch. HTML is a general language, and there are "viewers" that can read HTML. Some common viewers include Netscape, Mosaic, Lynx, and WebExplorer. Unfortunately they all have different subsets and supersets of HTML 3.0. The most basic set, known by all is:

<B> </B> Bold
<I> </I> Italic
<H1> </H1> ... <H4> </H4> Headings (1 being the largest)
<HR> Hard Rule (horizontal bar)
<BR> Break (end of line)
<P> Paragraph break
<IMG SRC=""> Image
<A HREF=""> Link.

There are also a set of tags for "forms", places to type, buttons to select, which I'm going to ignore.

There are two solutions to the different tags problem. Generally people support Netscape (which happens to have most of the tags) and text only, which is generally the simplest. Some of the cooler Netscape only commands are:

<CENTER> Center </CENTER>
<BLINK> Blink</BLINK>
<STRIKE> strike</STRIKE>
<BLOCKQUOTE> Like your English paper </BLOCKQUOTE>

HTML 4.0 is coming out soon. Hot Java by SUN is way cool and about a year away. SGI has a way cool VR version (but it requires an eight thousand dollar workstation to get just a slow view of things). The only way to keep up is to stay on-line. Some of the good HTML sites are: (or were)

So now that we have text and lines on the screen, we need to add some graphics. There are two standards used. GIF files are best for large solid colors and 256 color images. JPEG files are best for natural pictures, and images with more than 256 colors. (JPEG uses the discrete cosine transform and suffers from Gibb's effects when an image is highly compressed _ aren't you glad you took 429?) There are a variety of tools for converting just about anything into these formats. Try to keep the files to less than 100K. Don't have an image, but you do have a photo? The MicroComputer Facility (MCF - across from the Alexander McKenzie cafeteria) has a color scanner that works like a charm. Don't forget disks.

So you have images, and some idea of what you want for words, now what? Until Netscape is on the lab-net, you need to find a SUN workstation. Putting everything together is pretty easy, but difficult to describe as a step by step process. Find a geek (Myself, Brendon Wilson, or Chris Peake) and we'll show you how to "debug" your page. Once your page is done (hand waving), read the article about getting your stuff on-line. Happy surfing!

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