Q&A -- Entering Lucky Day Seven!

Date: July 11, 1998
From: bob@unc.edu
To: JOMC050 students

Hi everybody,

Other than a little incident with an apologetic person who backed into my car today before breakfast, the weekend is going better than Thursday morning went in the Mac lab! I hope you check in and see this before class Monday.

The biggest questions in the email for the past couple of days were about the Web page assignment and the upcoming test. (No surprises there!)

We obviously lost so much time with computer troubles on Thursday that I'm going to push the deadlines ahead a little. I'd like to give you a test on Thursday and have your first official Web pages due the following Monday. (Although I hope you'll resist the temptation to keep tweaking your HTML code all weekend and get the pages done Friday before the labs close.) How's that? I can be talked into giving the test on Wednesday if you want to get it out of the way and press on with the Web pages, but I don't want the Web page deadline to crowd your other work later in the month.

Your Web Pages

The Web page assignment is a slight variation on the one described in the Dead Tree Edition, pages 267 and 268, which is the version used in the Spring semester. (They had a whole month just for this assignment!) I'll hand out my own version of the assignment on Monday, including my own grading system, which is a little different from Prof. Aikat's.

The basic assignment is the same as described in the DTE. You'll make three Web pages:

• one will be the "home" page people see when they come to your Web directory at www.unc.edu/~yourname
• the second will be a personal resume, as if you were looking for a job instead of looking forward to another year of UNC. You can do a combination of "resume" and "portfolio" pages if you think that's a better way to present yourself and your work.
• the third "page" will be a report on your research topic. (It can actually be more than one page, if you want.) You will get the rest of the term to finish that third page, but you should have a working first-draft online by July 20, the day that the final versions of the other two pages are due. The working draft should be an expanded version of your topic proposal, something like Bob's banjo proposal, but with at least three annotated links to relevant Web sites.

The handout will tell you what features must be in those three July 20 pages.

The JOMC050 archives include templates for "home," "resume," "portfolio," and "research" pages. You are welcome to use these as a starting point, but there's a twist: The templates have some coding errors. They also have tons of comments explaining how they work or are supposed to work. Some people find the comments helpful. Others find them confusing, read them once, then delete the comments to make the code easier to edit. Even if you do not rely on the template to build your page, the page should answer questions that are included in the template comments.

You can use Netscape Composer to rework the templates into your own pages, which can make this a very easy assignment. But be warned that Composer inserts lots of extraneous codes into the pages which may make the HTML hard to read. Fine-tuning a page in Composer, or going back and forth between Composer and SimpleText, can be very frustrating.

Composer is handy for some things, like inserting tables and background colors, but it can be hard to make fine adjustments with it, so don't overdo things.

Remember, "Information" is this course's middle name. A simple page that tells its story clearly and attractively, with links that work, will beat a complicated page that looks confusing or doesn't work right, even if it took you 30 frustrating hours to make. You may want to begin a page with Composer, get any tables and colors right, then edit the code with SimpleText.

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The Test

The test on Thursday will have two parts:

1. A page or two of fill-in and short-answer questions about Internet history and information searching, based on your readings in the DTE and online, and your notes from a talk Monday by a guest speaker. We'll have fun reviewing it all on Tuesday and Wednesday.
2. A Web page with mistakes for you to find. The screen in front of the room will show what the page should look like. I'll give you a page of HTML with mistakes that would keep it from looking and functioning correctly. We'll review those codes on Tuesday and Wednesday, and also try to make some time to work on your pages. In the meantime, concentrate on the basic HTML codes that start on page 163 of the Dead Tree Edition. For a solid beginning, give pages 163-173 top priority. It's important that you practice and make plenty of mistakes of your own, since experience fixing them will help you see mistakes on the test. (You won't be able to try your "fixed" code in the test, just make editing marks on old-fashioned paper.)

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Other questions

Another good question from the email was about TCP/IP protocol and packet-switched networks, which I ran through in a big hurry last week. The best summary I see in our linked sources is CNET's How Does the Net Work? page. I don't expect you to memorize the details, but the illustration (and the ones in the DTE) may help make it clear how this is different from a telephone network. The CNET page is one of CNET's 20 Questions on the Internet, which was part of the "related sites" list for last Monday. Check it out, particularly the first six questions (about Internet history) and number 10 (about searching).

Speaking of HTML codes and questions, in my last message I mentioned a phenomenon on the Internet called the "Frequently Asked Questions" or "FAQ" document, in which people try to solve problems before they arise for the umpteenth time. FAQ lists are best known on Usenet, a collection of thousands of online discussion areas. Usenet is now part of the Internet, but it's older, and was invented by computer users at UNC-CH and some school in Durham.

Netscape can be configured to read Usenet "newsgroups" (which is what the discussion areas are called). but our lab Macs are not all set up to use that part of Netscape. We don't really have time for Usenet in this summer session anyhow. But during the nice relaxing Fall semester, you can use the UNIX newgroup reader, TIN, from your email account's main menu and do some text-only exploring, maybe even answer someone else's questions.

Anyhow, here's an example of a Usenet FAQ saved as a Web page in Holland: Pointer to FAQ Lists for comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
As you've seen, this page advises people what kinds of questions are appropriate for a newsgroup that discusses "authoring html." it also points to other FAQ files, including this one:
WebDesignGroup FAQ

And what better one for us to look at, since it's an attempt to answer 50 most-frequently-asked questions about HTML coding itself. Do note that most of the questions involve more advanced HTML issues than we are covering in this course. But take a look and see if they've hit any of your questions.

For the test on Thursday and for the Web pages you submit on the 20th, don't worry about mastering a zillion HTML codes. You should know the basic tags on pages 163 to 196 of the Dead Tree Edition well enough to look at the code of a page and tell what those tags do. (Or, more specifically, tell what they are supposed to do and fix any typographical error that keeps them from doing it!) For example, you should know which tags have more than one part or need to have ending tags.

For a simple checkup on the most basic tags, I still like Paul Lutus's how-to instructions, HTML for the Conceptually Challenged and the ATN handouts in your coursepack.

-- Bob

-30-

Is an old newspaper code for "The End"