When it comes to Internet connectivity, the world seems to be divided into two groups of people--those who aren't connected and those who want a better, less expensive connection. If you want an Internet connection or a better one than those supplied by expensive online service providers, you'll need to find a local Internet provider. In this article, we'll discuss some ways you can get the best Internet connection available.
There are several avenues for acquiring an Internet connection. If you plan to connect with a modem from your home or office, you'll most likely get an account through a university or a company that sells access to the Internet. A few businesses offer dial-in connectivity to their employees. However, this is the exception rather than the rule. One of the most difficult tasks you'll encounter in getting connected is just finding an Internet provider. Here are some resources that a novice internaut without an Internet connection can use to find an Internet on-ramp:
If you want to connect your business to the Internet from home--or testdrive the Internet from work--friends and coworkers, particularly those who use computers, can be a great source of information, and they're often the easiest to reach when you need advice. If you know of a computer guru, you can ask about Internet providers--but be prepared for a very thorough answer. People at your local computer specialty shop, library, and users' groups can often provide many insights into local Internet offerings.
Although several online services--such as Delphi, America Online, and CompuServe--offer some degree of dial-up Internet access, you'll generally get a better hourly rate from a local provider than from these services. Moreover, not all online services offer the breadth of Internet services you need. For example, many online services offer only E-mail access and give you limited capability to download files. You'll also find that online services routinely deny you access to World-Wide Web services.
If you want to connect your business to the Internet, your long distance provider may be able to lease your company a direct Internet connection. However, before you sign any long-term contract, make sure you search for all the alternatives. The National Science Foundation's InterNIC service maintains a fairly extensive list of leased-line Internet providers you could consider.
If you don't have Internet experience or experience with configuring an Internet host, you should consider hiring an Internet consultant. The money you spend on an Internet-savvy consultant with good references could save you thousands more in costly mistakes.
Before you connect to the Internet, you should know what services you want to access. The type of connection you use determines the breadth and functionality of programs available to you. Many first-time users are put off by the complexity of many UNIX Internet applications that traditional shell accounts offer. However, the Internet can be easy to use and look really great if you have the right kind of connection. Let's go over a few Internet connections and examine their strengths and weaknesses.
There are two basic ways you can physically connect your computer to the Internet: a direct connection or a dial-up connection. Depending on which option you choose, you'll access the Internet with either a shell account or an Internet Protocol (IP) connection.
The shell account is the most common method used to connect to the Internet. With this type of account, you use a communications package such as Smartcom, Procomm, or VersaTerm to attach to a host computer. After you connect to the host, you use its programs to access the Internet.
A shell account requires less setup on your part and for the Internet provider. You'll also find that most educational institutions offer only shell accounts. Commercial service providers charge less for a shell account than an IP connection. Additionally, since the Internet applications run on the host computer and send only text information back to your PC, the performance of an application on older PCs differs only slightly from today's fastest desktops.
On the down side, many applications available to shell account users are difficult to master. For instance, Figure A shows an example of a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) session that copies a file from a remote server to a personal directory. Online documentation for these programs--often called man pages--can add to a novice user's anxiety.
An IP type of connection can allow you to use applications that are more feature-rich and simple to use than those available on shell accounts. Instead of using the applications and computing resources of a host computer, you get to take advantage of functions and features of client applications that run on your own PC.
You can use Microsoft Windows, the UNIX X-Windows, or Macintosh-based graphical applications to access Internet resources. Using an IP connection and your computer's GUI interface can make your Internet wanderings more pleasant. As Figure B shows, you can transfer the same file as shown in Figure A without using the somewhat arcane commands you'd need with a shell account. You can simply use your Windows or other graphical user interface. Because of these and other reasons, IP connections are quickly gaining popularity.
Despite its advantages, configuring your PC to use an IP account can be puzzling when compared to using a shell connection. In addition, maintaining IP connections creates a large workload for your system administrator. Dial-in IP accounts can also add thousands of dollars to your school's or service provider's hardware costs. Although IP connections can provide an easier Internet interface, many people stick with a shell account either because it's all they can get or because it's less expensive.
Let's suppose you've decided to pursue an IP connection. You've still got more work to do. Once you make the decision to go with IP, you have to choose the type of IP connection. The three basic IP connections you'll encounter are direct, SLIP, and PPP.
If your computer attaches to a local area network (LAN) and your LAN connects to the Internet, you have a direct Internet connection. If your computers use Ethernet or a file server, you probably use a LAN. Your LAN attaches to the Internet through a device called a router, or gateway. This gateway provides a fast connection to the Internet that any computer on your network may use. Figure C roughly outlines the layout of a direct Internet connection.
If you use a modem to attach to the Internet, you may want to use the powerful programs on your PC, Mac, or workstation to help you navigate the Internet. You'll likely use SLIP or PPP to make this connection.
SLIP stands for Serial Line Internet Protocol, an aging yet widely available standard for dial-up Internet connections. A faster implementation of SLIP now in use, called CSLIP (compressed SLIP), improves SLIP's overall performance.
PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) is a newer protocol that allows fast, flexible, and simple IP connections. Although PPP's dial-up speed is nearly identical to CSLIP, PPP's flexibility over SLIP and CSLIP and its ability to work with various network types make it the dominant standard for dial-up IP connections.
You can get a good amount of information from InterNIC, the National Science Foundation's Internet Network Information Center. InterNIC maintains a large, up-to-date list of local and business Internet providers. You can get this information via Gopher, the Web, or E-mail.
You can point your Gopher or FTP client at the address is.internic.net. Once you connect, look in the path
/infoguide/getting-connected/united-states/
There you'll find two documents--internic-us-provider-leased, which has information about business and dedicated high-speed Internet connections, and internic-us-provider-all, which includes information about dial-up access providers. These are excellent resources if you're trying to learn how you can get better connected.
If you have E-mail access to the Internet, you can talk to InterNIC. Send your questions to
info@internic.net
There are many ways you can use HTML to publish content on the World Wide Web. Here are six ideas that you can use HTML for home or business:
Don't forget to remember who your target audience is when designing.
Don't assume that all users will have a machine with a lot of memory to cache graphic-heavy pages.
Don't use graphics just for decoration -- they should mean something or add value to your message. If you do plan to use a large graphic give the user a warning BEFORE they click on a hyperlink.
Don't send create links that have no clear purpose or send users on a trip outside your website that they will not return from.
Don't use empty phrases like "click here" that have little or no meaning.
Don't waste the user's time. Post information that will keep people returning to your site.
Do be clear, concise, and straightforward with you text. Use headings and styles to make text easier to read online.
Do consider users with non-graphical browsers.
Do, whenever possible. offer software to download or audio, video clips.
Do explain all links and where they lead.
Do use anchors to help user navigate quickly in a large document.
Do use a method that shows what information has been updated and when.
Do be consistent in your layout and [presentation of material
Do build pages that load quickly and are easy to navigate.
If you plan to build several Web pages on a regular basis, you should consider using a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editor. An HTML editor will make creating Web pages much easier. In addition, it can greatly enhance your HTML skills and your documents' appearance. In this article, we'll take a look at just a few of the HTML editors available for Macintosh and Windows.
If you're working with a Windows-based PC, you should take a serious look at HTMLed, written by Peter B. Crawshaw and distributed by Internet Software Technologies. This shareware package evolved--as many useful applications do--out of a weekend project in which someone needed a tool to speed up Web-page creation time. The shareware version of HTMLed includes several features that make Web-page creation a snap. The package sports a number of features, including
You can use the shareware version of HTMLed for 30 days to evaluate it before you pay the registration fee. In that time, you may find HTMLed's straightforward interface hard to part with. In particular, the ability to create custom buttons on a floating toolbar is one of the most useful features. You can use a custom button to include whole strings of information, such as long and complex strings of graphic and HTML link information.
Although HTMLed isn't a graphical editor like HoTMetaL from SoftQuad, it's much more flexible. If, for example, you edit a Web document on your Word processor and make an error, such as mistyping a tag, HTMLed will still open the file. HoTMetaL will usually refuse to open anything other than a perfect document.
The HTMLed Pro offers many features over the shareware package, including
You can find the shareware version of HTMLed at several Internet sites. Just do a Net Search for the shareware title.
Another excellent HTML editor is HTML Assistant, written by Howard Harawitz and distributed by Brooklyn North Software Works. HTML Assistant is freeware, making it a good deal for the budget-conscious individual. HTML Assistant is flashy and easy to use.
The freeware version sports a number of features found in HTMLed plus a few of its own. For example, HTML Assistant allows you to use an unlimited number of user-defined tools or tags. In addition, you can save and retrieve sets of commands from HTML Assistant's special User Tools files. This feature allows you to create your own sets of tags, such as the newer Netscape HTML extensions or image tags that reference graphics on your Web server.
HTML Assistant shares a few of HTMLed's limitations. Mainly, it can't load a file greater than about 32 KB. Although this isn't a big problem, many documents on the Net are larger than this--particularly tutorials.
Although it's not as simple to use or as visually appealing as either HTMLed or HTML Assistant, BBEdit is your best bet for building Web pages on the Mac. BBEdit allows you to add extensions that ease Web-page creation. Some of these extensions can help with HTML documents.
If you use the Internet, you naturally spend a good deal of your time reading messages and articles or writing them for others to read. During the writing process, chances are good you'll occasionally need to see how to use a particular word, check some grammatical idiosyncrasy, or double-check bibliographical citations in accordance with Modern Language Association guidelines. Until recently, it's been nearly impossible to find a decent online grammar and usage reference. Fortunately, Purdue University's Writing Lab now has a presence on the Internet. Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) can give you information on almost any writing-related topic.
The Purdue OWL includes over 100 different documents to help people write. Topics range from writing research papers, r‚sum‚s, and business memos to learning how to avoid run-on sentences. OWL can also help you with your writing through an E-mail tutorial session with a Writing Lab tutor or by allowing you to download instructional handouts.
If you want to browse the OWL's infor-mation, you can use Gopher, the World-Wide Web, anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or E-mail.
OWL's Web and Gopher sites allow you to access all the handouts available on either server. Both services feature plenty of pointers to other resources on the Internet. If you use Gopher or another Web browser to access the OWL, you'll easily find all the information you need through the online menus.
If you use a graphical Web browser through a dial-in connection, you'll want to make sure that your browser doesn't auto-load images when accessing the OWL. Although attractive, some of the graphics on this page are large and can add minutes to your browsing time.
If you want to bypass Web and Gopher menus and get right at the files, you'll find many OWL files available via anonymous FTP. To get a listing of the OWL's handouts, you'll want to get the index file from the sage.cc.purdue.edu server's /Pub/ directory. The URL for that file is
ftp://owl.trc.purdue.edu//Pub/index
You can also get more information about OWL via E-mail. To do so, send a message to owl@sage.cc.purdue.edu; simply type owl-request as the subject and, in the body of your message, include
Send docs
Send index
The OWL's index file includes a numbered index with descriptions of the contents of OWL files.
No matter which way you access the Purdue OWL, you'll find the material invaluable. If you can't find the reference at your desk, look to the wise old OWL for your answers.
Cobb Group, Inside the Internet
In some books and magazines, you'll notice that the first letter in a paragraph is huge, extending two or three lines below the first line of text. This letter, called a drop cap, helps enhance the page design and make the text more visually appealing. You can create drop caps in your Web pages using Netscape's extended image attributes.
You'll sometimes want to add graphics to the documents you publish on the World-Wide Web. Chances are you'll want to position your graphics so they appear in specific places in your Web documents.
As with graphics, you'll want to control the positioning and appearance of the drop cap you place in your Web page. Although many desktop publishing programs include a way to create drop caps, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) doesn't include a similar drop cap feature. Fortunately, Netscape can use graphics to get around this limitation.
In order to create a drop cap, you'll need a program that can capture an image from your PC or Mac screen. You'll also want a program that will convert that image into a GIF (the CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format) or JPEG (the Joint Photographic Experts Group) graphics image file.
Once you have these, you'll type the drop cap character into a word processor or graphics package. Adjust the font's size so that you have a large character, as shown in Figure A. You'll probably want to use a PostScript or TrueType font with your Mac or Windows PC, since these types of fonts can render smooth-looking text onscreen.
Next, use your screen capture program to take snapshots of the portions of the screen containing the characters you want to use, then save those images to your hard drive. You can use a program such as LView Pro for Windows--shown in Figure B--or Graphic Converter for Macintosh to crop the images to fit. Then use the Save As... option to save the images as GIF or JPEG files.
Now that you've saved the images as graphics, you can place the HTML references in your Web document. You can use any word processor, text editor, or HTML editor to create your HTML document. Remember to save your work as an ASCII text file--a Web browser will display all sorts of odd characters if you try to load a file in a Microsoft Word or WordPerfect file format.
Netscape's extended IMG ALIGN="LEFT" attribute dictates the positioning of each image. Specifically, this attribute left-aligns the image and drops it below the baseline of your text. The text in subsequent lines will wrap around the image nicely. Netscape's IMG ALIGN="LEFT" attribute differs from the standard HTML ALIGN="TOP" attribute, which can cause a large gap between the first and second line of text.
Finally, load the image into Netscape. If you keep your work on your local hard drive, use the Open File... option from the File menu. If you keep your work on a Web server, use the Open URL... option or type the URL directly into the Location window.
HTML and Netscape don't offer the precise character size and positioning controls that desktop publishing programs provide--not yet at least. The best you can do is get close to the right size when you snap your drop cap character. If your graphics appear too large onscreen, Netscape offers two more IMG tag extensions that can help you adjust the size of your drop cap: the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes.
For example, let's apply the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to drop caps. We'll add WIDTH="30" and HEIGHT="55"--measured in pixels--to the IMG tags. For instance, the first tag will read
<IMG ALIGN="LEFT" ALT="L" width="30" height="55" SRC="/art/L.GIF">orem ipsum dolor sit amet, ...
After you change both tags in your HTML editor, reload the document. With a few minor adjustments to Netscape's WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, your graphics can look nearly perfect.
Inside the Internet, Cobb Group, January 1995
If you've ever wanted to put together your own Mosaic World-Wide Web page, it's easy. The only things you'll need are a simple word processor, a basic understanding of URLs (universal resource locators), and a little practice with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document formatting.
HTML documents are nothing more than text files that incorporate hypertext tags. The tags are text-based instructions that a Web browser can interpret. Tags can contain page formatting commands and links to practically anything on the Internet, including other HTML documents, graphics, audio clips, and your favorite Gopher site or file archives.
You'll find your home page a snap to produce and the hypertext elements that format your document easy to understand.
Any good document should begin with a page design. It's always a good idea to keep your home page clean and simple. Begin with a document title and a heading, followed by an introductory paragraph and an index of what information is included in the home page. Once you rough out your outline, you'll want to create the text for your document. However, since you're creating a document for your Mosaic-type browser to read, you'll want to add paragraph- and text-formatting characters that it can understand.
The HTML tags in a document can instruct your Web browser to format and display text through a series of styles. HTML takes style-formatting tips from its predecessor, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an international standard for text markup that many publishing agencies adhere to.
HTML tags begin with the left angle bracket (<) followed by a directive, a style instruction, or element information. Tags end with a right angle bracket (>). A Web browser will interpret these tags and format the document it displays accordingly. You can apply HTML tags in order to define the style of paragraphs or the character style of a particular piece of text.
For example, although the line we see reads The Inside the Internet Home Page, the instructions your Web browser uses look like
<H1>The <I>Inside the Internet</I> Home Page</H1>
The first tag--<H1>--tells the Web browser to turn on the Heading 1 style. Notice the </H1> tag at the end of the line. This denotes the end of the Heading 1 style. Heading 1 is the largest of six heading styles that HTML supports.
Tags can also change the style of characters and words. The <I> tag in the title initiates italic formatting, and the </I> tag ends the italics. In addition, you can format text to appear bold, underlined, or in typewriter-style characters.
In addition to the text and paragraph formats, certain tags control where you end paragraphs (<P>), where you break lines (<BR>), and even where you add horizontal rules (<HR>) to your document. Also, you can set the title most Web browsers display with the <TITLE>...</TITLE> tag. All these basic HTML tags add to the flexibility you'll have when you lay out your hypertext documents.
These text-formatting options are just the beginning of HTML's features. HTML also allows you to create point-and-click links to other places within your document, to other documents on your computer, or to other documents or servers on the Internet. You can do all this through hypertext links, specifically the anchor and name links. Let's explore how these work.
When you click on a hypertext anchor, you instruct your Web browser to instantly jump to another Web-accessible location or resource. In this first example, we'll have the anchor link to another point within the same document. As you might guess, you assign that other place a name with the name tag. That word is anchored to a section named pages within the document. If you click on the word Web, Mosaic will jump to the pages section. The hypertext link for the Web anchor looks like
My favorite <A HREF="#pages">Web</A> pages and sites.
You can make any number of characters or words the active portion of an anchor. The format for hypertext links to names is
<A HREF="#Named_Place">Text to highlight</A>
To make the anchor perform its function, you must define the place where the name resides by using another hypertext tag--the name tag. The name tag's format looks like
<A NAME="Named_Place">Target text</A>
As you can see, just as you include text in your anchor, you include in a name tag the target text that the anchor link leads to.
This is a good time to note that capitalization doesn't matter in hypertext tags, including anchor tags. Both <i> and <I> work identically in HTML.
In addition to capitalization, HTML also disregards carriage returns. If you want paragraph breaks, you use the <P> tag to add extra space after a paragraph. If you wish to simply force a line break after a particular word or phrase, you use the <BR> tag.
Anchor tags to other documents work the same way as anchors to the name tag, except you put the path and name of the target document between the quotation marks. If a document is in the same directory as the anchor document, you simply put the filename in the reference for the link to work.
For instance, you might load your personal home page from your hard drive. If you use a Windows PC, you might keep your home page, HOME.HTM, in the C:\WWW> directory along with your HOT.HTM list of Internet sites. The easiest way to load a document on your PC (or Mac or UNIX box) with an anchor is to keep it in the same directory as the document that contains the anchor. Otherwise, you d need to include the complete directory information in the tag's filename reference. An example might look like
C:\WWW\HOT.HTM
To link to another directory or even a Web or Gopher site, you'll want to use a complete URL in your anchor in place of the directory filename. For example, this anchor might point to the Basking shark fact sheet maintained at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. It would include the URL for the fact sheet file and might look something like
<A HREF="http://www.mbl.edu/html/MISC/basking.html">Basking shark fact sheet</A>
With all this editing, you'll want to test your file to make sure your HTML tags and links work. To view your work, open your new home page with your Web browser. If, for example, you use NCSA's Mosaic, you'd simply select Open Local File... from the File menu and select the document from the Open dialog box. If you use another Web browser--such as Mozilla, AIR Mosaic, or MacWeb--each will include an option that will open a file.
Since most Web browsers will cache your home page in memory, any changes you make to your home page after you load it the first time won't appear until you reload your document. Look for your Web browser's Reload option to view those changes.
If you want your Web browser to automatically load your personalized home page after you create your HTML masterpiece, you'll need to change the default home page settings. You'll set this option from your Web browser's Preferences feature or, as is the case with older versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, in the MOSAIC.INI file.
RealAudio technology relies on software advances in three areas. The first of these is in file compression. While audio files aren't as bulky as video files, they're still quite a bit larger than ordinary text files. That being the case, without good file-compression technology, audio files would be too large to practically receive and play -- even if you have a top-of-the-line modem. You could easily spend an hour downloading even a modest length uncompressed audio file.
RealAudio's file-compression technology offers impressive results -- depending on the audio source, RealAudio's file compression squeezes an audio file to about 8% of it original size. With the compression, RealAudio files consume an average of only 1KB of disk space for each second of audio recording which won't overwhelm your modem.
RealAudio's second technological advancement involves client-sever communication and is in many ways the most dramatic feature of the product family. A personal computer using the RealAudio Player (the client) can communicate with a Web site that uses the RealAudio Server (the server) -- even while downloading an audio file! This means that with the RealAudio Player, you can start playing an audio file before the server finishes sending it to you.
The third RealAudio advancement, buffering and caching technology, works hand in hand with the second. With its buffering and caching routines, the RealAudio Player allows you to move forward and backward through an Audio file, much like you do with an ordinary audio cassette player. The RealAudio Player window even contains buttons that mimic those on your audio tape deck.
Of course, these window buttons represent only a small portion of the work done by RealAudio's buffering and caching routines. Since RealAudio allows you to play an audio file "on the file" even before the server has finished sending it, the software needs to buffer or cache while it recompiles the sound file, before playing it. The RealAudio Player also uses these routines when you perform other tasks with your computer that temporarily employ your system's CPU.
The sound quality as comparable to what you would hear on an AM radio. There are promises from the company for improvements in the future. For spoken conversation RealAudio sounds fine, for music you'll find a wide array of quality.
To use RealAudio Player, you need a 486SX/33Mhz or higher computer, running Microsoft Windows 3.1. Of course you will also need a sound can and speakers to play on them. RealAudio can work on 9600 BPS modems or higher, and you will also need either a SLIP/PPP account or a direct connection to the Internet.
Progressive Networks gives away the RealAudio Player free of charge. To get you own copy visit the Progressive Networks home page at:
http://www.realaudio.com/
You'll find plenty of lists on the WorldWide Web. Almost every Web page contains lists of happenings, ideas, and other information. Even if you use a graphics-based Mosaic-like Web browser, many of the resources you'll find will probably be in a list format.
If you're creating HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents for others to see, you can display your information with style and impact if you apply the right type of hypertext list format.
There are several hypertext list formats available. For example, one excellent way to call attention to a list of items is with bullets. Hypertext includes a special list format that automatically inserts bullets in front of each item in a list.
Inside the Internet, Cobb Group, February 1995
Bulleted lists--also called unordered lists--are very effective for drawing the reader's eye to the information contained in them. You can use bulleted lists to:
To create bulleted lists in your HTML documents, you use the <UL> and </UL> tags to begin and end the list. In addition, each list item must begin with the <LI> tag.
To begin, create a document in a word processor or text editor that lets you save your work as a text file. Then enter the <UL> tag, this turns on the unordered list formatting option. Type in your list of items with a <LI> tag at the begininning of each bullet item. Enter the </UL> tag at the end of the list.
Save your work as a text document and call it test.html (TEST.HTM for DOS users). Then, load that document with your Web browser. (Most browsers include an Open... or Open File... item on the File menu.)
While bullets are great eye-catchers, they're also dark. Too many bulleted items can be confusing, causing the entire list to lose its impact. Therefore, you'll want to use bullets sparingly.
Bulleted lists are not as effective when you want to stress a sequence of events or a particular order. Fortunately, another standard HTML list format--the ordered list--may be perfect for the job.
Ordered lists automatically number each item in your list. As with the bulleted (unordered) list, each item in an ordered list begins with the <LI> tag. However, an ordered list begins with the <OL> tag and ends with the </OL> tag.
This list type is great for any items you need to list by number. Examples of the kinds of items you'd place in a numbered list could include steps in a procedure, leading producers in your product line, or a top-ten list.
Make sure you save your document in text-only format and switch back to your Web browser. If your browser is still open, use its Reload option to load the test document.
HTML includes a format specifically designed for handling glossary-type layouts--the definition list. This style is an excellent choice for lists of terms and catalogs of items with descriptions. Let's add a definition list to the test document.
A definition list includes three parts: the beginning and ending tags <DL>...</DL>, the tag for the definition's term <DT>, and the definition's data tag <DD>.
The <DT> tag typically formats the term flush left. The <DD> tag immediately follows the term and indents the text about 1/2 inch from the left. To see how your definition list tags work, add the information from Figure E to your test document, then save the file. Figure F shows how a Web browser might display the data.
You can nest list types in HTML documents in much the same way as you create subheadings within a document. Nesting more than one of the same list type or combining list formats in your documents can add visual impact as well as allow you to present your information effectively.
To illustrate how you can nest items of the same type, let's insert an unordered sublist into another unordered list. To begin, simply enter a set of <UL> and </UL> tags. Between them, create three list items--Unordered Lists, Ordered Lists, and Definition Lists. Enter another <UL> tag after the first item. Then add three more items. (You can place tabs before each of these, since HTML will ignore the tags.) Finally, place the </UL> ending tag and save your file as test.html or, for DOS users, TEST.HTM.
If you don't have your Web browser loaded, do so and open the test document you created in the accompanying article. Your browser should have an Open File... option under the File menu. The sublist creates what looks like a standard outline format.
Generally, the bullet in each successive subheading changes from <303> to ø to <296>. Although this is an HTML convention, not all Web browsers will render the same results. In future revisions of HTML, you may be able to define the bullet type, but for now, the bullet display is up to your Web browser.
Since the Internet offers many opportunities for artists and designers to publish their work, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that the Internet also has many forums for those artists and designers to learn new techniques--as well as a place to just talk shop.
Whether you're looking for graphics techniques or printing tips, you can take advantage of electronic support'resources. LISTSERVs, USENET newsgroups, FAQ files, and Web documents are available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Almost anyone with an Internet E-mail account can participate in E-mail-based discussions. All you have to do is send a request to the correct LISTSERV, and you'll begin receiving messages almost immediately. For instance, the LISTSERV at indycms.iupui.edu manages the PageMaker discussion called PAGEMAKR. If you want to subscribe to that list, simply send a message to listserv@indycms.iupui.edu and place the command subscribe PAGEMAKR Your Name in the body of your message.
The only problem with E-mail-based discussions is that they can often generate a lot of messages in your E-mail box. This can be a problem if you don't get the opportunity to check your E-mail every day. As an alternative to E-mail discussions, you may find USENET newsgroups and FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) files an excellent resource.
There are several USENET newsgroups you can reference for help with your design or publishing application. Some newsgroups you might look into are
alt.aldus.pagemaker
comp.text
comp.text.desktop
alt.fractal-design.painter
comp.text.frame
misc.writing
comp.fonts
In addition to informative and often heated discussions, you'll usually find a posting of the group's FAQ file. You can get the FAQ files for each newsgroup via anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) from the rtfm.mit.edu FTP site. Look in the /pub/usenet-by-group/ directory for the newsgroup you want. For instance, if you want to find the FAQs from the alt.aldus.pagemaker newsgroup, you look in the directory
/pub/usenet-by-group/alt.aldus.pagemaker/
Although E-mail and newsgroup discussions can provide interactive support for graphics and production questions, you can also get help through another aspect of the Internet--the World-Wide Web.
One of the easiest ways to add impact to your Internet presentations is to add graphics. All the most popular graphical Web browsers allow you to view documents that include graphics. You can easily jazz up your home page and any other document that you want to publish on the World-Wide Web--all you need is some basic HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) know-how and some graphic images you can include in your documents.
Most Web browsers include the ability to display graphics. Unfortunately, most browsers can display only a few types. When your Web browser encounters a new graphic, it looks at the graphic s filename to determine what type of graphic it is. You can easily identify the most popular graphics types by their filename extensions:
.gif: A format developed for CompuServe
.jif: Another form of GIF file
.jpg: A format often used to compress photographic data
.xbm: An X-Windows graphics format
In the growing world of Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and Macintosh Web clients, the two formats you should know the most about today are GIF and JPEG. Although recent legal matters have cast doubt on GIF's future, it remains the de facto standard image format for Web browsers.
The GIF file formats were originally developed for CompuServe Information Services so its users could quickly transfer and display graphic images. Because you can use GIF to compress images to such a small size, files just speed across the Internet. The GIF format works best for simple graphics such as drawings of flags, cartoons, and images with only a few colors.
Because of a GIF image's functionality, most of the Web browsers will recognize and display GIF images. Once your computer receives the image, your Web browser will spend little time decompressing the GIF data. GIF images are so universally accepted in graphics-capable Web browsers, you can even include them inline with your text, as shown in Figure B.
The GIF image format has some visual limitations. For example, your graphic can include only 8 bits of color data, which equates to a palette of 256 colors. While this isn't an issue for many of the images you may want to display, photographs and art reproductions may lose some of their impact if limited to GIF's 8-bit palette.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compresses both full-color and gray-scale photographic images, including portraits and group photographs, nature shots, scans of your cat--you get the idea. JPEG compression isn't as effective as GIF for compressing line drawings or cartoons, but if you want to display an image with rich color, JPEG is the answer.
As an applied graphics format, JPEG also carries its own set of problems. JPEG images traditionally don't decompress as fast as GIF images do, although this may change in the next few months. Currently, not all graphics-capable Web browsers will display JPEGs themselves, leaving that task to external helper applications you must configure your Web browser to use.
Although some Web browsers will display JPEG-compressed images without any outside help, many can t. As a result, most of the images you ll find on the Web are still GIFs.
To add a graphic to your Web pages, you use the image tag. The basic format of the image tag is
<IMG SRC="filename.gif">
You can include either a full path or a relative path to your file. An image tag containing a full path to a file called smiley.gif might read
<IMG SRC="../pub/www/users/cwilde/art/smiley.gif">
The relative path is somewhat easier to work with, particularly if you set up your own personal pages on a Web server and wish to keep your graphics files in a separate directory. In this case, all you need to include is the path to the image file relative to the document that contains the link. For example, if you were to include the smiley.gif file in your home page, /pub/www/users/cwilde/home.html, the tag would need to include only the name of the directory and the filename. The relative path image tag
<IMG SRC="art/smiley.gif">
is obviously much easier to type, and in this case, achieves the same result as the full path. In this type of path, the art/ subdirectory or folder must reside inside the cwilde/ folder or directory.
You can easily add a graphic in mid-sentence in your hypertext documents. To do so, just drop the image tag in the location where you want the graphic to appear. The image falls directly into place and, by default, aligns the bottom of the graphic with the baseline of the text,.
You can make an image a link to other pages or Internet resources. All you have to do is click on the image, and your Web browser will load another document. Let's look at how you can do this.
To create a clickable image, you need to place the image tag within a hypertext reference tag in your home page. An example of this combination tag is
<BR>
<A HREF="cool.html">
<IMG SRC="art/smiley.gif"></A>
Our favorite Web pages and sites.<BR>
<BR>
Instead of placing text within the hypertext reference, this example places the image tag that points to the document cool.html within the hypertext reference. The image and the text will display on the same line.
If you use an item more than once in your document, your Web browser will note that you've used that image before and load it from memory. This speeds up your image's load time, since your Web browser only needs to pull that image across the Internet once. This is also true when you use the same image in several documents. In either case, your result is greater Internet efficiency.
A standard feature of the GIF image format is the option to store the image data in the GIF file in an interlaced fashion: instead of storing the image's scan lines in exact sequence, equally spaced nonadjacent sets of lines are stored together, and these sets are stored in sequence.
Most programs that support display of GIF files, including NCSA Mosaic, display both normal and interlaced GIFs completely properly. The Netscape Navigator provides an additional feature: since images in Netscape are normally decoded and displayed incrementally (as data comes in over the network), the fact that interlaced GIFs are decoded and displayed incrementally means that the image appears to "fade in".
The Netscape Navigator fulfills a long-standing request from the NCSA Mosaic user community and has native support for inlined JPEG images. All you have to do is specify a JPEG-format image as the SRC value for an IMG tag, and The Netscape Navigator will decode and display the image just as it would a GIF image.
The big advantage of JPEG images is that the compression ratios can be much higher for most images (particularly "real life" images). JPEG is also a "lossy" compression method, meaning that you don't generally get the exact same image data upon decoding that you had when you encoded the image.
During the encoding process, you can generally specify the "quality" of the encoding. Specifying a low quality value can give you an even higher compression ratio.
While The Netscape Navigator supports JPEG images across platforms, many existing browsers do not support inlined JPEGs. For your documents to work with those browsers as well as Netscape, your server will have to be smart enough to send GIF images to non-Netscape Navigator browsers and JPEG images only to the Netscape Navigator browsers.
As the Netscape Navigator is laying out a new document, it must pause at each inlined image and go over the network to discover the height and width of the image before it can continue laying out the document (because a properly-sized bounding box must be put in place so the document is laid out properly once the image is loaded). Over a network link with any significant latency, this can cause end-user performance problems relative to how quickly the document could be laid out if the browser knew the image's height and width to start with.
For this reason, the Netscape Navigator allows you to specify an image's height and width as attributes of the IMG tag. The height and width are normally specified in pixels. For example, if you are inlining an image that is 413 pixels wide and 356 pixels high, the IMG tag would look like this:
<IMG SRC="foo.gif" WIDTH=413 HEIGHT=356>
Browsers that do not have support for the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to the IMG tag will simply ignore them and lay out the document normally.
The Netscape Navigator, on the other hand, will use the height and width information to pop in place a properly-sized bounding box upon encountering the IMG tag and will continue laying out the document text, with no performance delay to go discover the width and height of the image over the network.
Most general-purpose image utility programs will give you the exact size of an image in pixels.
If you specify WIDTH and/or HEIGHT values in an IMG tag that differ from the actual width and/or height of the image, the Netscape Navigator will use the width and height values specified in the IMG tag and scale the actual image to fit.
For example, if you have an image that is actually 123 pixels wide and 78 pixels high, but you create a document that inlines the image as follows:
<IMG SRC="b.gif" WIDTH=492 HEIGHT=312>
...the image will be scaled to fit the dimensions 492 by 312.
This means you can purposely cause any image (GIF or JPEG) to be scaled to a larger size (or, for reasons I can't imagine, a smaller size) on the fly, by the Netscape Navigator.
Another extension, called LOWSRC, to IMG, as follows:
<IMG SRC="highres.gif" LOWSRC="lowres.jpg">
Browsers that do not recognize the LOWSRC attribute cleanly ignore it and simply load the image called "highres.gif".
The Netscape Navigator, on the other hand, will load the image called "lowres.jpg" on its first layout pass through the document. Then, when the document and all of its images are fully loaded, the Netscape Navigator will do a second pass through and load the image called "highres.gif" in place. This means that you can have a very low-resolution version of an image loaded initially; if the user stays on the page after the initial layout phase, a higher-resolution (and presumably bigger) version of the same image can "fade in" and replace it.
You can freely mix and match GIF (both normal and interlaced) and JPEG images using this method. You can also specify width and/or height values in the IMG tag, and both the high-res and low-res versions of the image will be appropriately scaled to match.
If the images are of different sizes and a fixed height and width are not specified in the IMG tag, the second image (the image specified by the SRC attribute) will be scaled to the dimensions of the first (LOWSRC) image. Reason: by the time the Netscape Navigator knows the dimensions of the second image, the first image has already been displayed in the document at its dimensions.
Frames divide Web pages into multiple, scrollable regions where you can present information in a more flexible and useful fashion. Each region, or frame, has several features:
This allows you to:
The GIF format contains a special feature called transparency. With transparency, you can specify one color in your image to be transparent when you view the file. GIF can display up to 256 colors in an image, and you can define any one of those colors as a transparent color.
How you create a transparent GIF depends on the type of computer you use and the software you have available. First you need a program that's able to define a color as the one that won't display -- the transparent color.
If you use Microsoft Windows, Lview Pro is an excellent graphics viewing and conversion shareware utility. Most of the major FTP sites archive a copy of Lview Pro, which costs $30. If you can't find one at your local FTP site, use Yahoo! and do a search.
To make the background of a GIF image transparent, first load the image into Lview Pro. Since a GIF can display only a certain number of colors at one time, look under the Retouch menu for the Color Depth option. In the Color Depth screen select Palette image button and then select the number of colors you'll use in your image.
Next, look under the options menu and select the Background Color... menu item. When the palette appears, choose the color that will be your transparent background then save the edited file. Next load the image into your Web browser.
To view your work, place the HTML code <IMG SRC="IMAGENAME.GIF"> into a plain text file saved as HTML. Save your document to the same directory on your hard drive as the image. Next,open your HTML file by using your web browser's Open File.
Macintosh users will want to try Graphic Converter, a super graphics can-opener shareware utility. Graphic Converter quite handily creates web-ready GIFs--complete with transparent backgrounds--from almost any graphics file format. Graphic converter includes the interlace feature, whereby graphics seem to develop before your eyes.
Mac users can find a copy of Graphic Converter at:
ftp://ftp/uwtc.washington.edu/pub/Mac/Graphics/GraphicConverter2.1.3.sit.bin
Or do a search with Yahoo! to find other sites with the file.
To make a background of a GIF image transparent load the image into Graphic Converter and look under the Picture menu for the Colors option. Select the last item from the Colors submenu, Transparent GIF Color...
Graphic Converter will display an editing screen in which you can select the color you want to use as your transparent background. Once you choose the background color, select the Transparent checkbox and then choose OK.
Finally, save the image as a GIF format file. When you place the image into a web browser, color you selected will be transparent.
To view your work, place the HTML code <IMG SRC="IMAGENAME.GIF"> into a plain text file saved as HTML. Save your document to the same directory on your hard drive as the image. Next, open your HTML file by using your web browser's Open File or Open Local option.
If you've kept up with the latest trends in Web page development, you've probably seen animation on Web pages already. Using CompuServe's GIF format, you can easily place animation on your Web pages.
GIF animation isn't really a new idea. You create most GIF animations with the GIF89a file structure, but even the GIF87 structure supports animation. The GIF file format allows you to define multiple images in a single file. You normally don't see GIF animation because most GIF viewers don't support it. Instead, the GIF viewers simply display either the first or last image of an image set.
However, by using Netscape Navigator 2.0 and a tool called the GIF Construction Set, you can create GIF animations. Netscape Navigator 2.0 is one of the few Web browsers that supports GID animation. The GIF Construction Set lets you create a GIF file that contains multiple images and controls for defining animation.
The first step in creating an animated GIF is obtaining the shareware version of the GIF Construction Set, which you'll find at the Alchemy Mindworks Web site at http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.htm. Once you've installed the GIF Construction Set, you can start creating GIF animations.
To begin, draw the first frame of animation, using a tool such as Windows Paintbrush (or Paint for Windows 95 users). Create the rest of the frames in the animation sequence, saving each with a unique filename.
Now you can place the images into the GIF Construction Set program. Open GIFCO and select New from the File menu. You'll see that GIFCON automatically created a GIF89a header that defines the global color palette and screen size. Next select the Insert button and then select the Control button on the resulting Inset Object toolbar. Each image in your GIF animation set needs a control that defines how the image behaves. The control specifies the transparent color and delay between frames for the images.
Next, select the Insert button again and select the Image button from the Inset Object toolbar. From the resulting Image Select dialog box, choose the file that contains the first frame of your animation and click OK. If the image's palette is different from the global palette, a dialog box will appear asking you how you want to handle the image's color palette. If you're unsure of which option to select, choose the first one, ?Use a Local Palette for This Image. Choosing this option will create a color palette that's specific to the image.
Continue inserting controls and images until you've placed all the frames in the GIF Construction Set program and then save the image set.
Now open your Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser, Select Open File... from the File menu and then select the GIF file you just created. Netscape Navigator 2.0 will open the GIF file and play the animation from beginning to end.
An image map can be just about any graphic you want to make "clickable." Each of the items on an image map guide you to other pages of information.
Client-side image maps allow you to offer clickable images that don't depend on CGIs, Web servers, HTTP, or your Internet provider. When you create client-side image maps, or smart maps, you place the map coordinate information directly to your Web documents -- all the processing then takes place on the PC that views your Web pages. With client-side image maps, you can offer maps from practically anywhere.
It's easy to add a client-side image map to your HTML documents. To invoke a client-side image map, you'll see some new HTML codes -- USEMAP and MP. USEMAP points to the MAP coordinates table for that image. You create and name this map information, complete with the coordinates and destination information. You'll place this information within your HTML document.
To begin, use an IMG tag to insert a graphic in your web document. Then add the USEMAP parameter to the IMG element along with the map name. Your tag should look like this (sample.gif is the image name, colormap is the map name):
<IMG SRC="sample.gif" USEMAP="colormap">
Next create the map definition colormap. For this example, the map will include only rectangles, so you will use the area type RECT followed by the coordinates for each rectangle you plan to link to another file or location. Place the coordinates of your image map in the map definition and save your complete HTML document (for this example we'll call the file testmap.html).
In order to test your work, place the testmap.html file and your graphic in the same directory on your hard drive and open your web browser. Select Open a File... from the file menu and open testmap.html.
<img src="SAMPLE.GIF" usemap="TESTMAP.HTML#COLORMAP">
<map name="COLORMAP">
<area shape="rect" coords="24,143,530,179" href="HIT1.htm">
<area shape="rect" coords="22,190,530,220" href="HIT2.htm">
<area shape="rect" coords="23,233,530,263" href="HIT3.htm">
</map>
Creating image maps can be a tedious procedure. If you use a standard drawing or painting program that will give you coordinates, you'll have to carefully mark and measure your image's coordiantes. Later you'll place those coordiantes into a map definition file or a map description in HTML.
An image's pixel coordinates begin at the 0,0 (X,Y) coodinate in the upper-left corner of the picture. As you might image, more complex maps take quite a while to define.
In addtion to mapping coordiantes, some servers may require that you suppl;y map information in a specific format.Fortunately, there are shareware progremas that map coordinate information.
WebMap lets Macintosh users create image maps by writing map information that in NSCA or CERN formats (file formats for map coordinates).
You can find the latest version of WebMap at:
http://www.city.net/cnx/software/webmap.html
Windows, Windows NT, and Windows 95 users will want to try Map THIS!, an excellent freeware applciation that makes creating and editing image maps a snap. What's more, Map THIS! generates the client-side MAP markup for you. One caveat: Map THIS! is a 32-bit program. so in order to use it, you must run eaither Windows 3.1x with the Microsoft 1.25 upgrade, Windows NT 3.5x or Windows 95.
http://galadriel.ecaetc.ohio-state.edu/tc/mt/
File compression is one of the Internet's greatest boons and often one of its greatest frustrations. Almost every file you retrieve from an Internet source is compressed in some way. In this article, we'll discuss the Internet's common text and data file compression types. Then, we'll direct you to applications that can extract information from many compressed file formats.
Text and application files demand more stringent compression schemes than do graphics, audio, and video data. When you receive a document or program, you need every bit of data that the original file contains. Once you extract a file from a compressed image, the resulting file should be an exact duplicate of the original. We call this type of compression loss-less.
Graphics and audio compressors often use a type of compression called lossy. These compressors may lose relatively insignificant bits of information in order to compress a file to a greater degree.
Loss-less and lossy compression schemes and their applications differ greatly.
A server can store more files if they're compressed. And it makes sense to conserve as much space as possible, particularly since so many people use the Internet's resources. As a result of its reduced size, a compressed file transfers across the Internet to your computer more quickly--and causes less congestion along the way--than an uncompressed file. Also, smaller file sizes mean you spend less time downloading.
If you pay a per-hour charge for your Internet access, you'll want your files compressed to reduce your online charges. However, because of the millions of users and hundreds of operating systems that run on the Internet, compression schemes and types vary greatly.
Whether you work with text or application files, it's up to you to figure out how to decode compressed files into a format you can use. Fortunately, you can usually determine a file's compression type by its filename.
A filename's suffix will usually indicate the type of application that decodes the file. However, you'll very likely run into several compressed file types as you peruse the Internet. Let's take a look at the more common file types you should expect to see.
UNIX is the most prevalent operating system on the Internet, and many versions of it exist. Most include the compress command. When a UNIX user compresses a file with compress, the result is a filename with .Z as the default suffix. UNIX is case sensitive, so the capital Z is relevant. Depending on the system, a compressed file's name may also end with -z. You'll often find FAQs and text files in the .Z format.
Many UNIX systems include a more recent compression program called gzip. The suffix .gz tells you that GNU's gzip application compressed the file. The advantages of gzip over compress are many. For instance, a file that gzip compresses is almost always smaller than one the UNIX compress application creates. Also, a UNIX-based File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server can automatically compress files by using gzip.
UNIX can pack several files into a single archive. You can tell these files by their .tar extension, which stands for tape archive, a format still used in most UNIX installations. You'll see many filenames on the Internet that end with the .tar suffix. Usually, .tar files are destined for UNIX machines only.
You may find filenames that end with the .tar.gz or .tar.Z suffix. These are simply compressed archives. You extract data from the archive file after you decompress it.
Older versions of gzip created filenames that end with the .z suffix. The .z files use a compression scheme identical to the DOS-based compression program called PKZIP.
PKZIP 2.04g is the latest version of this popular DOS compression program. (PK stands for Phil Katz, the program's author.) These filenames end with a .ZIP suffix. The companion program, PKUNZIP, extracts information from a file that PKZIP compressed.
PKARC is another DOS-based compressor. PAK (currently at version 2.51) is also a popular DOS format found on the Internet. Files that PKARC compresses have filenames that end with the .arc suffix; files that PAK compresses have filenames that end with the .pak suffix.
Storing Macintosh files on the Internet can cause problems because a Mac's file structure includes two elements called forks: the data fork and the resource fork. A regular Mac file will lose its resource fork if you store it on non-Macintosh filing systems. However, you can combine the two forks into a single binary file before you store them. BinHex, the standard format for that purpose, creates files whose names end with the .hqx suffix. (Another encoding format, called AppleSingle, isn't used as widely as the BinHex format.)
However, BinHex doesn't compress a file. The two most common Mac compression programs are StuffIt and Compact Pro. Stuffed files have filenames that end with .sit, and Compact Pro filenames end with .cpt. Both applications create self-extracting archives, whose filenames end with the .sea suffix.
It won't take you long to find other compression formats on the Internet. They'll include (but aren't limited to) files having names ending with .zoo, .boo, .pp, .pit, and .lha. You may also encounter files converted into the UNIX btoa (binary to ascii) format. No matter what format you encounter, you'll have to find a way for your computer to open a compressed file.
Fortunately, you can find applications on the Internet that can get the data out of just about any type of compressed file--but you'll need applications specific to your computer's operating system. Let's discuss some of the applications that your operating system can use to compress and decompress files. We'll also look at how file extensions might affect your choice of application.
Although you may need to extract files from many compression schemes, you'll find that most DOS-specific files on the Internet are in PKZIP format. You can distinguish PKZIP-compressed files by the .ZIP (or .zip) extension. Table A shows you various PC file-compression applications and where you can find them on the Internet.
The top-of-the-line Macintosh compression program is StuffIt Deluxe from Aladdin Systems. It contains filters that can convert data to and from .Z, .z, .hqx, UUencoded (files embedded in E-mail messages), btoa, .ZIP, .PIT, .arc, .tar, and .pak formats. If you regularly use a Mac to access the Internet, this is your one-stop compression and decoding solution.
Shareware programs include StuffIt Expander (the latest version is 3.0.7), StuffIt Lite, macgzip_02.1, MacLHA, and BinHex 5.0 (binary) among others. Table B lists locations where you can find many of those files.
Your UNIX system administrators store versions of many compression programs on your local server. The files in Table C may already exist at your site. Ask your local UNIX guru what applications your site stores before you download any of those utilities.
Table A, Table B and Table C are by no means a complete guide to all the compressed-file formats you'll encounter on the Internet. If you're looking for more details about compressed file types, you have several options.
You can get an excellent cross-reference guide for compression applications that David Lemson (lemson@uiuc.edu) maintains. The file is available via anonymous FTP. Point your FTP client to ftp.cso.uiuc.edu and get the file compression from the /doc/pcnet/ directory. If your program accepts universal resource locators (URLs), use ftp://ftp.cso.uiuc.edu//doc/pcnet/compression. The file is in ASCII format.
The compression FAQ that Jean-loup Gailly (jloup@chorus.fr) maintains is another exhaustive compression reference. You can FTP the first part of this three-part FAQ from any of the following sites:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/part1.Z
ftp://ftp.uu.net//usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/part1.Z
ftp://ftp.Germany.EU.net//pub/newsarchive/news.answers/compression-faq/part1.Z
For the rest of the FAQ, download parts 2 and 3. You'll also find the FAQ on several USENET news groups. You should look in news.answers, comp.compression, and comp.answers for the latest posting.
Before you can get on the information superhighway, you need to configure your Internet software to take advantage of all the services that make the Internet work. If you use Windows, OS/2, or a Macintosh to access the Internet, there are some basic configurations you need to set before you can use many Internet services. In this article, we'll explain how you can use your Internet software to its fullest.
Just as you had to register for a Social Security number, your computer is assigned a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) number or numerical address. That number is either static--meaning you type it in--or dynamic--meaning you get a new one from a pool of numbers every time you connect to your host server.
To get to the Internet, your computer usually attaches to a host or network. You can consider that network as a little country, or subdomain, and that country as part of a larger continent, or top-level domain.
Both the subdomain and top-level domain have names. For example, you might see whitehouse.gov on the Internet. The top-level domain .gov includes US government Internet networks. The subdomain, whitehouse, is the name of an Internet-connected network at the White House. In another example, the domain name daisy.com is an Internet-connected commercial network called daisy. The com portion is a top-level domain, and daisy is a subdomain.
Your computer also gets a name, sometimes called a fully qualified domain name. Names don't mean very much to computers, but they do to you. A program and network computer called the Domain Name Server, or DNS, converts the easy-to-remember names into the numbers that computers use.
Your DNS passes its name and number to other DNSs worldwide. In addition to the addresses of other domains, your DNS keeps a record of all the names and associated network numbers of the computers on your local network. If anyone in another domain wants to use a server or resource in your domain, they'll most likely negotiate through the DNS. Entering the name of your DNS in your Internet configuration lets your computer know where to look to translate your name into the numbers it needs.
Of course, there's a router, or gateway, that connects your network to the rest of the world. Think of it as your network's on-ramp. Even if you dial into a host system or online service, it has a gateway that connects to the Internet. These gateways have names and addresses, too. When you set up your TCP/IP information, you'll have to enter the name or address of the gateway so that your computer knows where to send information destined for the Internet.
Two mail-related services you might use are POP (Post Office Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). POP holds your mail until you come to pick it up. SMTP transfers your mail when you decide to send it. If you run an E-mail package such as Eudora, you'll need to configure both mail settings. Some news readers will require this information as well.
Just as your computer needs to know where to look for mail, you need to tell it where to collect your network news. Your programs will use the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).
You may want to synchronize your computer's clock with some standard device. There may be a time server on your network that your computer can use to keep its clock running smoothly.
Most importantly, you should keep a record of your login ID and password and your E-mail ID and password. You'll need these often, and if you forget one, your network administrator may be very unhappy. Remember that login IDs and passwords are case sensitive. For example, the login IDs LUser and luser are different.
In addition to your password, you should keep a record of the name of the file server and the path to your home directory--if you have one. Just like IDs and passwords, Internet path names are case sensitive. The path to your home directory should look like
/usr/home/LUser/
You'll want to document any extra information about your setup, particularly your modem settings, login sequence, and the phone number for your local technical support person. If you connect to the Internet via modem, some important options include your modem type and any configuration and init strings you use.
It's always a good idea to keep track of your login sequence. You might want to print your screen information or simply write down every step you take to successfully connect.