Requirements

There are certain things you'll need to get started. These are...

A Text Editor

Any text editor. If it can save in plain (ASCII) text, it will do. This means that anything from Microsoft Word 6.0 to the DOS Edit program to TeachText to UNIX vi will work. All it has to do is save the documents in plain, flat, unstyled ASCII-style text.

A Web Browser

Netscape Navigator, NCSA Mosaic, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Lynx, MacWeb/WinWeb, Cello, Chimera, WebExplorer, NetCruiser, whatever. In fact, it's a good idea to keep more than one browser around for testing purposes (more about that later).

A Graphics Tool

This gets a bit trickier. Sure, you can draw pictures with no problem, but can you get them into the right format? In order to include a picture in a Web page, it needs to be in the Graphic Interchange Format (GIF). Adobe Photoshop will save indexed color files as GIF files, and there are a number of format converters on the market. Whatever you get, make sure you can get your files into GIF.

A Web Server

Strictly speaking, this is optional. You can write Web pages in a text editor, save them to your machine's hard drive, and load the pages into your Web browser in order to see how they look. You don't even need a network connection to do this. The option to load pages from your hard drive is typically called something like "Open Local" (Mosaic) or simply "Open File" (Netscape).

However, if you plan to publish your documents so the rest of the world can benefit from them, you'll need to put them on a Web server. As long as you're using a Windows-based PC, a Macintosh, or a UNIX box, and it's connected to the Internet, you can set your machine up as a Web server. For example, the program MacHTTP will let you turn your Mac into a Web server. Check around to see if you can locate something for your platform of choice.

Next -- Chapter 1: Terms and Concepts
Previous -- Introduction
Table of Contents
Glossary
Index