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Read This First: For my class on Anthropology & the Web in Autumn, 1997, I made a number of demo web pages to illustrate basic web techniques. They are neither beautiful nor stimulating, but they fairly clearly illustrate a wide range of techniques that are easy to use in developing your web page.
The demo pages, only very slightly revised, are assembled here to help members of the Department of Anthropology manipulate web pages.
To use a demo page, first click on the link and look at it and notice what it does. If you want to do any of that, then go to "View Source" in the menu bar of your web browser and the browser will open a new window that will show you the underlying code. If you print from the regular browser window, you should get a printout of how the page appears. If you print from the source window you should get a printout of the underlying code.
I am NOT available to provide additional detail. Buy a book.
Forms are filled out and submitted to the web page maker. They are usually used to provide a way in which visitors to a site can place an order or sign a guest book. Each form consists of multiple fields that the visitor can fill in, and the page packages the information collected for processing by another computer program living on a mainframe somewhere. Unfortunately if you are not up to writing the software that will make use of this information, there is little you can do with it except have the web page Email it to you, and unfortunately it comes in slightly garbled form that is hard to read. (On newer browsers that problem is obviated if you include the phrase enctype="text/plain" as part of the mailing instruction, as I have done on this demo.) Here however are some examples if you want to see how it works in principle.
The web is not a copyright-free zone if you ask the lawyers, but in practice anything out there is susceptible to a good deal of moving around, and a lot of people are delighted to provide graphics, jokes, texts, and Lord-only-knows what else free for the taking. Google, Altavista, Dogpile, or another search engine can easily find you collections of graphics that are available for anybody's use as "freeware," a category of public-domain material that exists to the eternal distress of politicians seeking to tax it, entrepreneurs seeking to sell it, and lawyers seeking to win lawsuits about it. (Caution: If you want to be squeaky-clean, remember that not everyting on the Net is freeware.) For a useful jumb start, try Phyllis's Backgrounds & Alphabets.
Simple word processors seem to be much appreciated by web site makers, since they save everything as simple, unadorned text files and don't screw around with idiosyncratic format changes and don't insinuate "improvements" into your code. Many are essentially free or inexpensive elaborations of the "Note Pad" type of editor that comes with your operating system, and many of their improvements really do make life easier. My own favorite for Windows, and a program I use probably more often than any other on my computer, is NoteTab Pro (which, however, is NOT Unicode-compatible). If you do web stuff with Asian text in it, you may also wish to check out the free and extremely useful BabelPad editor, although it is weaker than NoteTab Pro in virtually all features OTHER THAN its handling of Unicode and Asian text.
Demonstrations: Useful Stuff
Demonstrations: Unuseful Stuff
Frames divide the computer screen into several different windows each with different content. Most commonly this is done to provide one window with a clickable index that changes the content of the larger, second window. Each frame setup includes one file that includes the "frameset" instructions for the different windows to be created but does not itself appear on the user's screen, and one page for each of the windows it defines. Earlier browsers did not support frames, so I tend to avoid them on my own pages.
JavaScript is a mini-language used to handle forms within a web page. It does not have the capacity to write anything to a file, so it can't handle something like a guest book, but it is able to write information back to the same page. In MMW I used such a page, for example, to provide a worksheet on which a student entered grades from various assignments and got back a projected course grade. JavaScript is a study in itself. Although it is become a routine part of many web pages, it is not necessary for most web sites (thank goodness).
Perl is a computer language (like Pascal or Fortran). CGI means "Common Gateway Interface," which is what sends the information to the mainframe, turns on the Perl script, hands it the information, gets the result, and sends it back. This particular demo is a "guest book" style form I made for a class on China. It invites you to add nifty computer sites to a growing class collection, together with your comments. There are two parts: A guest book page containing the information displayed to the world, and a form to fill out to add stuff to the guest book page. A third part, working behind the scenes, is the Perl program living on the server that takes the stuff from the form and rewrites the guest book page to accommodate it.
Miscellaneous Utilities & Questions Answered
This is a list of the codes used to produce characters such as & # é that are not part of the usual ASCII codes. (Similar tables can be found in most manuals of HTML.)
This page allows you to enter a color code or name and see how your browser interprets it. This is useful as a quick reference when you are trying out color codes for features of your own web pages. Caution: Particularly with color names, different browsers and different machines do not make quite identical interpretations.
Downloadable Software & Clip Art
Graphics & Clip Art