Ontario Association of Physics Teachers

	How to write for the Web
	by Ed Sternin

Introductions and disclaimers

Hi, my name is Ed Sternin and I am a Web amateur. You are reading this on the Web (this workshop does not exist in any other form!) so you must know enough to get your browser going and to actually click your way here. That was Web 101.

Now you want to write for the Web (that's Web 202) and this workshop will show you how simple it can be. It is important to have something to say, though. In the tutorial itself we will write a Web page around which you can build a lesson on volcanoes for your class. This is just an example, to get you on your way.

I said I was an amateur. We all are. Web is too young to have professionals, though numerous are the pretenders to the title. Nothing you will learn today is set in stone, except this: Web is a process as much as it is the result, it's an ever-shimmering web of connections, human-to-human. Computers are only incidental.

Basics

You are using X-terminals. The "computer" is somewhere else (and it's called bohr, to honour Niels Bohr) and your X-terminals are screens attached to bohr via the network. The program runs there, but you see its output in a window here.

There are three windows on your screens: a shell, an editor, and a Web browser. Shell is where you type, DOS-like, commands for bohr. asedit is a simple Windows-like text editor (feel free to scan through its menus). The editor is needed so that you can create HTML (the code) which can then be read by Netscape which is, of course, the web browser. It will render the irresistible Web pages that you create for the young and inquiring minds.

Depending on what computer hardware you use at home, your editor may end up being Notepad or TeachText. Any simple editor will do, so all the skills you learn today should be directly transferable.

A lot will be achieved today using the cut-and-paste technique: highlight by click-dragging the left button, then paste with the middle button, in the same or another window.

Workshop participants' pages

The pages you will be working on are already pre-"published" on the Web. The subdirectory public_html of your account on bohr is visible to the world:

OAPT1

OAPT2

OAPT3

OAPT4

OAPT5

OAPT6

OAPT7

OAPT8

OAPT9

OAPT10

Ready? On with the tutorial! Here's the plan for the rest of the day:

VolcanoWeb tutorial: We'll dive in right now, and resurface in about 1.5hrs to review and to have a round-table discussion.
Principles of good Web design: A case study: re-designing Brock University web presence. I'll give you my opinions, and you'll tell me what to do with them.
Other lessons we have learned: Writing for the Web is easy. Writing good stuff is another matter.
Pointers for further browsing: A highly personal collection of pointers. You can come back to this on-line workshop when you return home from OAPT'97.

This page is: http://www.physics.brocku.ca/oapt97/webtut/index.html
Last reviewed by: edik@brocku.ca on 19-Jun-97 at 18:44
E.Sternin © 1997 Disclaimer