The growing popularity of the World Wide Web is phenominal.  Not only is it
the method of choice for most internet users, but it is a quick, easy way
to spread information.  One measure of it's increasing popularity is the
ever growing number of personal homepages. I have recently created my own
and it occurred to me that, with the spread of personal homepages comes the
spread of the hypertext markup language (html), the code these pages are
written in.

I figured to myself, what better place than this to discuss html, favorite
web sites, creative uses of html, and to surface questions about html syntax,

80 responses total.

I thought I'd begin by asking if anyone has, or has seen any creative web
sites / uses of html?

        re # 1  No I haven't and it bothers me...  I'm starting to think
WWW is the first wave of the commercialization of the internet, draining
it of it's former life and turning it into an "interactive" billboard.
        Flame away if you so desire...

I think it is marvelous that it is involving more people in internet-related
activities who wouldn't have done so except for the Web.

Check out the Ann Arbor Homepage.
http://info.ann-arbor.mi.us/ann-arbor/online.html

It has a special section on the AA Art fair.

 how does one use that http command?

Depends on how you access the internet.  If you're a grex member,
you can do it in lynx by typing 'g' and then that long "http://..."
sequence (which is called a URL, short for "uniform resource
locator").  But you won't see any of the graphics that way, since
lynx is a text-only interface to the web.  For the graphics, you
need a graphical browser such as Netscape or Mosaic.

I've been doing quite a bit of web browsing lately and agree that
it is remarkable and for the most part marvelous the way it is
making the internet accessible to more people.

I share some of Matthew's concern that the web is becoming overly
glitzy, but I see more abuses in private individuals' homepages
than on commercial pages.  Everybody seems to be trying to create
the world's most pictorially stunning home page for themselves.
The result is countless homepages that are overloaded with large
graphic images that take *forever* to display, at least on a
slowish PPP connection such as I have.  When the page finally
displays, the information content often turns out to be minimal.
Most irritating.  Sometimes I think the internet is becoming the
glitternet.

However, that's a minor gripe, really.  The easy access to
information afforded by the web is truly remarkable, and in
the short time I've been involved I've found it to be invaluable
professionally.

For an example of a modest homepage with minimal graphics, check
out my embryonic one at http://emunix.emich.edu/~remmers.

And besides, that glitzy over-graphicized trend is what will keep
Joe "My First Computer" Shmoe on our side.

 Thanks, John.

        Actually, I think it's *good* that the commercial companies are
working through the web...I'd rather have them there then advertising
other ways, say through junk email or Usenet posts.

I was talking to some one the other day, telling them about some web
thisthatortheother and a friend of theirs, whom I did not know, jumped
all over my back about how WWW was evil and why do you need pictures and
all you really need on the internet is ftp and telnet..
I told him why do you even need those, all you need is a disk and some
good walking shoes.

I'm puzzled by the popularity of personal home pages on the web. I have
noticed that people haven't been very aggressive in publishing personal
home pages in newspapers. In fact, most people are usually somewhat shy
and don't want their names in the newspapers. Why do they want them on
the web?

Putting your home page in a newspaper costs money and is low tech, just to
name a couple of things.

This response has been erased.

Gull, in response to your comment, i belive the commercialization of the
internet has dangerous ramifications. 

The internet, as a good friend convinced me, is one of the last refuges
of freedom from censorship. PEople are allowed to post whatever they want
within very few rules. 

But companies like AOL and Compuserve are gaining more of a foothold in the
intersts of the web as a whole. I think it is a good idea for companies to
be able to advertise, but if you have ever seen the way AOL censors its
users, you would see my point more clearly. 

Just about everynoe agrees that the government should stay out of policing
the web and the internet in generalI. I, for one hand, would be just as 
mad as if the government had decided to listen oin on a private phone
call of mine. 

Are you sure you're not thinking of Prodigy?  If you want to be afraid
of companies that exert undue control, fear Netscrape or maybe MicroSoft.

I'm a Prodigy subscriber but don't do the bulletin boards there,
but I have the impression they've backed off considerably from
their original policies of tight control.  Prodigy also offers
Usenet news (I believe all groups, including the "offensive"
ones), web browsing, and internet mail.  I'm impressed by the
degree to which the service has opened up lately; it seems to
represent a significant change of philosophy.

Marc, thank you. WATCH OUT FOR THE NTESCAPE CORP!!!!

re #15:  This is good news to me, as I recall subscribing to Prodigy for
about a month.  After that time, I realized that I couldn't do anything
useful or really fun from it.. in fact I recall it being a really great
place to buy furniture or find out the weather in Brazil, but an otherwise
way-too-overly-pretty toy.

The commericalization of the net is inevitable.  Either the government has
to support it, or commercial interests do.  Actually, the way I understand
it, the major backbones have been privately owned for quite a while now. 
I don't think the net will be censored in its entirety; it's too
distributed, it isn't all controlled by one group.  Individual services,
such as Prodigy, can, of course, do what they want, but people can always
take their business elsewhere.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, as long
as the net isn't all owned by one cmpany, it's going to remain fairly open.

sbj - thanks for starting this. While tryinglearn some things
about HTML I have had a lot of help from srw.  From what I have
seen so far, the really oustanding pages use graphics for identification,
teaching, and explanation. "Pretty" is nice, but the "wow" factor
wears out fast.  Are the HTML and WEB helsites on the net posted
someplace else on Grex? If not, they could be.

I was wondering something:  What's the policy on web pages on grex?
Am I correct in thinking that as long as there are no images,
they're ok?  Just wanted to be sure..

This response has been erased.

The only reason for that limit is the low bandwidth link. If we can find
a way to upgrade the link, we'll relax the limit on graphics.

I'm a jpeg fan, myself.

hehe.. well I spent 6 months last year learning TIFF specs in way too much
depth, so I have a bit of a bias.  Anyplace I can get jpeg specs, just
for the heck of it?

If you're a big fan of graphics formats, O'Reiley has a big book full of
'em.

The Web, as with desktop publishing and everything else, has concentrated
on lame use of form over genuine expression of content in the short-term.
Java and VRML and the like are only going to make the situation worse in 
the short term.  Eventually things will settle down and people will start
to figure out "It's the content, stupid!"  I only hope HTML hasn't been turned
into a PDL by then; after all, that's what PDF is for.

My Grex web page does include a picture (of me), but the picture doesn't
reside on Grex so it doesn't get accessed over Grex's link.  I like the web,
and had some success with it.  I have a work-oriented web-page at TAMU that
includes all sorts of info on my research projects, but also includes a
detailed bibliography of several hundred references in my research area.
The bibliography is a great magnet.  Other researchers create pointers to
it.  They send me mail telling about their new papers.  I made some of the
best industry contacts I ever found through that web page.

I thank that's a key point, and a small scale example of what Marc is saying.
You need to offer some content that people want to see.  In my little
subdiscipline, people like to look at the bibliography and see themselves
referenced, and have it for a resource to find other papers.  It's useful
information that I had in hand that I could put up.  Pictures need to be
danged pretty to be worth anything, and the big title-gifs some people put
up don't qualify.

I noticed that on Netscape there is on option to make loading in-page
images optional (I think; haven't tried the option, yet).   When selected,
you need to choose "load images" to reload the page w/images.  This may be
the way to go if using a slow link and wanting to sample a variety of
pages without tripping over gif this and gif that.

  I agree with the comments about content.  HTML is a great tool, but
right now it is still mostly in the hands of people much more interested
in HTML/computers/internet than anything else.  Who said "the medium is
the message"?  It seems to be true in a sense, at least initially. 

I wonder how many "degrees of seperation" there are between any randomly
chosen pair of html docs?

Six.

Here's a question for the html experts:  Suppose you have some text
with special indentation requirements, e.g. a poem that's supposed
to look like this:

        blah blah blah
                        blee blee
                        bloo bloo
            aber baber snaber
                        foo

Is there any way of specifying variable indentation like that in
standard html?

You mean <PRE>? :-)

As Marc said, you can use the <pre> tag, which stands for preformatted, and
will leave the text however you type it in.  Unfortunately, that usually puts
the text in a different font, and makes it look rather ugly.  You can also
do indentation with the <dd> tag, but that only allows one indentation level,
rather than the two you are using in your example.  

You can get arbitrary indentation using mested <DL> tags (using
<DD> outside of a <DL> is illegal) but the results will be browser-
dependant and vary depending how each one interprets them, because
you're using the language to do something it wasn't intended to do.
It may be worth considering using something other than HTML for this; after all
the Web supports tons of formats (plaintext, PostScript, RTF, PDF) if
what you really want is a page description language.

Is there a page description language that will work for that which is
supported by Web browsers?

        In #29 I should have said that I wanted the text displayed
        in the normal "proportional" font. That rules out <PRE>.
           The nested <DL> approach that Marc suggested works fine
        in Netscape, but its effect is browser-dependent, as Marc
        points out. Netscape also recognizes the <PLAINTEXT> tag but
        uses a fixed font to render plaintext, unfortunately.
           Are there any browsers that don't require an external
        viewer to do Postscript or PDF? Or that support the notion
        of a "multimedia" document--part HTML, part Postscript,
        etc?
           I realize that HTML is supposed to be a notation for
        structural markup rather than page description, but then
        how do you justify the <BR> tag? If line breaks can be
        part of a document's logical structure, then so can
        indentation levels, seems to me.

There have been proposals to make something indentation a secondary
attribute of paragraphs a la alignment.  I don't remember whether
that's in the current version of the spec, which I don't have in front
of me; see <http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/> for the working
group for HTML standardization.

Many (most?) browserrs have the ability to view PostScript, but usually
it's kind of inconvenient to use.  PDF may provide the needed functionality
in the long run.

My personal heuristic for HTML is its use for nonsighted users.  I know
at least one guy who is blind and uses WWW; HTML tags can be mapped into
appropriate speech synth markup (read them, make additional pauses and/or
emphasis, etc.)  As Dr. Remmers correctly observes, <BR> is an example
of a case where things aren't strickly structural; the process does involve
degrees of pragmatism, but not so much as to justify <FONT> and <CENTER>
and <BLINK> (oh my!)

While I think that homepages are a passing fad (#10 above), I'm finding
the web increasingly useful for *information*. I am engaged in several
activities in which there is a lot of exchange of information, and what
were earlier newsletters, and then mailinglists and newsgroups, are now
appearing on the web, with much greater ease of browsing and downloading.
Even commercial use can be a benefit - apart from the "glitz"pages. I use
X-10 home control, and I just found the page for Home Automation, which
includes on-line ordering (with credit card security) (though it didn't
work to order their catalog - what is a network error #14 in Mac
Netscape?). 


I think that the criteria for useful web sites are a) information that one
wnats/needs, b) easy downloading of useful software, c) not much need to
read through a lot of hype and verbosity, and d) easy to print documents.
I have found that the use of a lot of formatting and fonts in stuff you'd
just like a printed text copy of, is a real nuisance. There should be an
option in Netscape (etc) to download (and print) a text (ascii) only copy. 
(A not insignificant reason is also that I use an inkjet printer, and ink
is expensive!)

I have just started exploring the WWW (intrepidly) and have only come across
what I consider to be advertisements.  I know there must be more to it than
that, but I don't know what I am looking for.  The fun will be in the search.

That is, if the search doesn't kill you! <laugh>

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