This is an out-of-date document, which has been preserved for historical reasons only.

Instructions for providing information via WWW at HUT

Preface

• work or study at HUT
• have some experience about reading documents on WWW
• wish to provide information to others via WWW.

If you wish to provide official information on a laboratory or some other organizational unit, please contact the responsible person there; if you are that person, please contact Webmaster for arrangements. There are some general guidelines (in Finnish) as regards to content. For the technical part, you can follow the instructions given here, providing the information first as a private person and moving or copying the information to a suitable "official place" later on.

The URL of this document is ./infoprov.html

Introduction

If you want to set up a WWW server you can get some technical assistance from the HUT Computing Centre, especially from Webmaster who will link information on your server to the HUT main server.

However, most users are not interested in setting up a WWW server, since they can make use of existing servers. In practice this means that they will just put their documents onto the disk of the HUT main WWW server, www.hut.fi, managed by the Computing Centre. This server runs on a Unix machine to which no direct user logins are allowed, but it effectively shares a relevant part of the file system with general-purpose Unix systems of the Computing Centre, such as Vipunen and the Alphas (named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta). This means that you can use any of those computers for creating and updating your WWW pages. Some knowledge about Unix is required, but knowing just a few commands and the basic use of the Emacs editor is sufficient.

To put information onto WWW, you can work as follows:

1. connect (login) to one of the computers mentioned above
2. give the command
   use www
   which will create a subdirectory named public_html for you and set up directory protections appropriately as well as make it accessible via www.hut.fi
3. put your documents onto that directory; you can even put normal text files there, but to utilize the power of WWW you need to learn some way of producing files in the real WWW format, called HTML.

Putting documents onto WWW

There are some rules according to which the contents of files are interpreted on WWW. For example, a file with a name ending with .html is interpreted as a genuine WWW document (written in the HTML document description language), and a file with a name ending with .gif is interpreted as a picture in the GIF format. If your document is "plain text" to be shown exactly as written, you can use a file name ending e.g. with .txt. For further details on the effect of the file name ending, please consult the local document on Mime media types.

For example, if you have a document called abstract.txt in your home directory, you would give the command

mv abstract.txt public_html

If you want to start writing a new document, you could just change your working directory to public_html, with the command cd public_html, and start writing the document with Emacs (or some other editor). In this case the document will be on WWW from the very beginning and other people may access it while you compose it; if this is not desirable, you can of course first create the document into your home directory and move it when it is ready.

Having put a document onto WWW, you can immediately check the situation by viewing it using some WWW browser program (such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, Lynx, or Opera) and giving a URL of the form

http://www.hut.fi/u/userid/filename

where userid is your user id (the one you type when you log on) and filename is the name of the file you have put into the public_html directory. Notice that you only give the relative file name within that directory.

In fact, the WWW server www.hut.fi has been configured so that all of the following forms can be used synonymously:
http://www.hut.fi/u/userid/filename
http://www.hut.fi/users/userid/filename
http://www.hut.fi/home/userid/filename
http://www.hut.fi/%7euserid/filename
http://www.hut.fi/~userid/filename
and you could use the one you prefer when announcing your pages. (But please avoid the last alternative, since it may cause confusion.)

Assuming that the file name is abstract.txt as in the example above and that your user id is jkorpela, you could give the address www ./abstract.txt to your WWW browser to check that document is really there, on WWW. If it is a plain text document, it will be displayed exactly as written, using monospaced ("teletype") font, with the same division into lines as is used in the file itself. This, of course, is very primitive; for instance, headings are not displayed prominently, and the document presentation does not adjust to the width of the browser window.

Producing genuine WWW documents (HTML documents)

There are three essentially different ways to produce HTML documents:

1. You can use a text processing program such as MS Word, WordPerfect, TeX or FrameMaker to create a document. Then you can use an automatic conversion program to convert a document from the format used by the program into the HTML format. In this approach you need not know anything about HTML, in principle. But in practice the conversion tools may perform very poorly, even producing incorrect HTML. Thus this approach is mainly applicable to dealing with old documents which already exist in, say, MS Word format.
2. You can use a so-called HTML editor such as Netscape Gold or FrontPage. The worst problem with these is that they usually produce incorrect HTML which may look good on one browser, awful on another.
3. You can just write an HTML document using a text editor such as Emacs. In this approach you must of course know how to use those HTML constructs which you need. Typically knowing a dozen such constructs is quite sufficient.

use htmltools

rtftohtml filename

If the filename is test.rtf, for example, the resulting HTML document created by the program is test.html and you can then simply put it into your public_html directory.

There is not much to be said about the second approach, i.e. using "HTML editors", in addition to warning against typical editors which produce vendor-specific HTML contructs and misuse standard HTML constructs to create the WYSIWYG illusion (What You See Is What You Get). However, there are some HTML editors which effectively allow you to write HTML in a comfortable way and to have a view (one possible view) of the document as seen on a browser. They might be of some use provided that you know HTML.

In the third approach, i.e. if you directly write your document in the HTML language, the following information is probably sufficient to get started:

• You should begin your document with the following:

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
  <TITLE>title of the document</TITLE>
  

• Use, in the place indicated above, the construct <TITLE> ... </TITLE> to specify the title of the document. This title is not a part of the document itself but is displayed separately to the user who is browsing the document.
• Use the constructs <P> and </P> around paragraphs. (An empty line in the HTML document does not generate a paragraph break.)
• Using the construct <HR> you can get a separator between major portions of text (typically, a a long horizontal rule).
• Use the construct <BR> to force a line break (but no paragraph break).
• If your document contains the character < (less than), > (greater than) or & (ampersand), they must have a special representation, because if typed as such they are interpreted as parts of HTML markup notations (tags). The representations are: < > &
• Use the construct <H1> ... </H1> to specify level 1 (top level) headings in the document. Replace 1 by 2 or 3 to specify lower level headings.
• To include preformatted text which is not to be formatted in any way by WWW browsers, e.g. text which contains tabular data, insert the construct <PRE> before such text and the construct </PRE> after it. (For tabular data in particular, more more advanced markup exists; see e.g. the section on tables in Learning HTML 3.2 by Examples.)

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<TITLE>A simple HTML example</TITLE>
<H1>A simple HTML example</H1>
<H2>Basic things</H2>
<P>
This is a paragraph. The line breaks are insignificant
within HTML documents, since the WWW browsers do the
division into lines.
</P>
<P>
This is another paragraph.
</P>
<H2>Other things</H2>
<P>
The less than, greater than, and ampersand characters
may cause unexpected effects.
In HTML, you must type the ampersand character, the
characters lt and the semicolon to produce
expressions like
x &lt; y.
</P>
<P>
It is a very good idea to put at least your name and
E-mail address into every document.
The date of the creation or last update may also
be very useful later on.
</P>
<HR>
Jukka Korpela, jkorpela@malibutelecom.com<BR>
Last update: October 15, 1997.

Next you could read, for instance, the more systematic Introduction to HTML by me or some of other HTML primers. The following list of additional tags is intended to give just an idea of some of the capabilities explained there or in other HTML primers:

• <IMG ...> indicates that an image (e.g. photo or drawing) is to be inserted
• <STRONG> ... </STRONG> specifies that the text is to be strongly emphasized (typically displayed in bold face by WWW browsers)
• <A HREF="URL">text</A> causes text to appear in a distinguished manner (typically, underlined or in different color or both) on the screen, and selecting that text (typically, with a mouse click) will lead the user to the document specified by the WWW address URL
• <UL> ... </UL> indicates a list so that each list item is specified within them with the prefix <LI>.

Writing a personal WWW home page

It is not necessary to have a personal WWW home page in order to provide information via WWW, but you can use a home page for various purposes:

• to provide information about yourself (e.g. your job, your interests, your addresses, your photo)
• to provide an index of your documents, to make it easier for other people to find them
• to make it easier for other people to find out that "you are on WWW", i.e. that you have documents on WWW; a link to your home page can be made to appear on the list of all users' home pages through which people can then find you.

cd public_html
emacs index.html

There are instructions both in English and in Finnish for using Emacs. For very short instructions in English, consult the booklet Welcome to the HUT Computing Centre, chapter 7.1. In Finnish there is a separate guide on using Emacs.

Your home page is accessible via WWW using a URL of the form

http://www.hut.fi/u/userid/index.html

but the part index.html may also be omitted.

If you wish to make a link to your personal home appear in the list of all users' home pages at the university, you need to give the command
publish-www
on one of the Unix computers of the Computing Centre. This needs to be done once only, and it will take effect (i.e. your page will appear on the list) next midnight.

Many people have created their own home pages by modifying somebody else's home page. You can use the list of users' home pages to find a nice home page which you like to use as a model. You can then, for example (after the command cd public_html) give the command
cp ~jkorpela/public_html/index.html .
(notice the space and the period at the end of the command!) to get a private copy of jkorpela's index.html file, and you can then modify it. When modifying another user's home page, remember to correct all information so that it applies to you!

Last update: 2000-02-28