UNIX SIG By Chris Fearnley 215-724-2265 After 3 years as the UNIX SIG leader it is time for me to pass on the leadership. The main reason for me leaving PACS is the new meeting site: it is too expensive and inconvenient for me to get to. I figure it would cost me $10/meeting (on SEPTA's R2 line) to get to the meeting. Then there is a one mile walk along one of the most dangerous suburban highways that I've ever seen. There is NO sidewalk (how can a road that leads to a school be build without sidewalks?). So even though I would enjoy a one mile walk (hell, I've walked over a mile to each PACS meeting for the past three years), the threat to life and limb and extra expense are just not worth it. Sorry. Hopefully, someone will carry on the UNIX SIG now that Linux has become popular and commercially viable (Alan will lead next month's meeting). But there is another group: The Philadelphia Area Linux User's Group (PLUG) which meets on the first Wednesday of each month (Since January 1 is a holiday we will meet on January 8 but in February we will meet on the 5th as usual). PLUG meets at the Cyberloft Cafe (http://www.cyberloft.com) 1525 Walnut Street from 7-9pm (In the City and easily accessible by public transportation!!). Meetings are free and open to the public. I hope to see you there. As a farewell, I have composed a little piece on web authoring which I hope everyone enjoys. Web Authoring Web authoring is the art of publishing on the World Wide Web. It is both simple and complex. Designing good web pages and maintaining them is inherently complex work. Yet the technical tools needed are very simple (any plain text editor will do!). The two reasons for the complexity are first that hypertext is much more involved (from the design point of view) than say writing a book. And secondly, the media your audience uses to view your web documents may be substantially different from the tools you use to write the web pages. Because it is so cheap to get your message out to the the whole world (much cheaper and easier than getting a publisher to publish your magazine article), I think everyone should write a page or two and put it on the web. If you start now, in a couple of years you might find that you've become an expert! First, let me discuss why good hypertext is complex. In a book one makes a thesis in the introduction and then elaborates on it through a number of linear chapters. But in hypertext you could have simply an introduction with links to your elaborations (each of which would need to be able to stand its own since there may be links into the document which originate from anywhere!). Cross references are how one navigates the web document. If you use too many cross links, the document looks busy. If you use too few, it looks barren. If your page has all content and no navigation tools (like a table of contents), it's hard for the reader to find what they want. If the page is all pointers and no content, it can be disorienting (like in the proverbial room of mirrors: which way do I turn). So the process is a bit of a balancing act. Finally, one should include lots and lots of content. Disk space is cheap and you can include volumes of data that would be prohibitively expensive to publish in book format. In sum, web design is radically different from what most writers have to deal with (it is fundamentally different from normal advertising and in my experience those marketing firms that move into web publishing are, in general, not doing a very good job). One should be prepared for some learning curve (however, it should be trivial to write your first web page if you don't mind that you'll modify it extensively later). But complexity can be broken down into pieces: one can start with a modest web document and it can evolve and grow (new links and pages can be added to flesh out the material) over time. So if you give it a lot of time and have patience, each step can be simple until ultimately you end up with a very navigable and useful contribution to the Internet. Secondly, HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the language used in web authoring) is browser independent (that is, the HTML document does not specify to the browser how the document should be rendered -- this makes it completely unlike word processing where the goal is to get something on paper that looks good). If you write your web page for only Netscape or Mosaic, then your page may be ugly or even completely unusable for other browsers. It is pretty easy to write web pages that support ALL browsers. Simply don't use all the fancy non-standard extensions that the Big browser vendors are pushing (i.e., use strict HTML 2.0 or HTML 3.0). You can include fancy java and graphics because even browsers that can't display these will ignore them. But don't put your content in the java and jpegs. They should be thought of as enhancements to make things look snazzy. The content should be in plain old HTML. I even think that most database applications would be best served by writing them in POHTML. It makes the documents cacheable and usable by all browsers. There are lots of places to find out about web authoring on the Internet. Perhaps the best technique is to use your browsers View Source function to see how others write their HTML. Unfortunately, since lots of people use GUI tools to build their web pages, the source often looks extremely ugly when viewed. If your tools do this to your pages, get another tool! I wrote all my web pages (under http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf) with the vi text editor. And I wrote them to be readable (feel free to barrow some of those ideas for your own documents). My final advise: think carefully about the question "what do I want to say". And think about that again after you have published your pages publically (did you say what you wanted?). The key to good web authoring is good design, good integration of content and navigability, and support for all types of browsers. Yggdrasil CD Last month I reviewed the Winter 1997 Yggdrasil CD. I received replacement disks from Yggdrasil which have solved the problems I mentioned. Yggdrasil claims that only a small number of the promotional disks were defective. I now have all the Internet RFCs (Request For Comments) on CD (well only through rfc1998)! Do Enjoy! And Farewell.