Department of Engineering

Producing material for the WWW

This page is primarily about producing material for the World Wide Web. Other pages deal with accessing the WWW, the WWW for admin staff, Advanced WWW production, Web servers at CUED and WWW site creation

WWW Page Production

Guides and Tutorials

• General Introductions
  • HTML Dog (guides and references)
  • W3 schools (tutorials on many themes)
  • Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
  • NetSkills supply various courses to the UK Higher Education community
  • WWW Authoring by Example
  • Useful Resources for WWW Authors
  • Yahoo's Page Creation page
  • Web Authoring Resource Centre (Fred Riley)
  • The Web Builder's Emporium has many resources.
  • The Computing Service Courses in HTML cover many issues
• Style Guides and Templates
  • CUED WWW House Style
  • Tips on Web site design
  • Composing Good HTML
  • Yale C/AIM WWW Style Manual
  • Creating KillerWeb Sites
• HTML (HyperText Markup Language) has gone through various releases: the current version is HTML 4.0. Browsers don't all understand the same HTML features, but if you use simple HTML commands you shouldn't have any problems.
  • Getting started with HTML (by Dave Raggett - a 10-minute guide)
  • Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes (Philip Greenspun)
  • Beginner's Guide to HTML
  • A Brief Guide to HTML (from Computer Services)
  • The Web Developer's Virtual Library intro to HTML
  • A list of special characters

Validation

Remember to check the resulting files. Look at it with various browsers (IE, mozilla/netscape and a text-only browser like lynx). You'll need to proofread your documents online - don't depend solely on print-outs!

You can also run automated checkers

• Windows-based authors can use Xenu for link-checking
• Checkbot is a free, open source link-checker
• webpage link checker and HTML checker (both local access only)
• The W3 consortium offer a CSS checker and an HTML checker
• webxact can determine a page's star rating for accessibility to people with disabilities, and to find compatibility problems that prevent pages from displaying correctly on different web browsers.

Note also that the Disability Discrimination Act, which came into force on 1 October 1999, has made it a legal requirement that information (including that publicly available on the Web) should be accessible to disabled people. A page of information is available online from Cambridge Universiry. The APU's Web Accessibility Guidelines are useful too.

Utilities on the CUED Teaching System

The following are installed

• Text - latex2html converts LaTeX to HTML (use it with the LaTeX html package). Netscape Navigator Gold 3.01 has a WYSIWYG-ish HTML editor. asWedit and to a lesser extent emacs support HTML production too.
• Graphics - xfig and xpaint can both produce gif files. xv can produce gif screen dumps. whirlgif produces animated gif files and giftrans creates transparent GIFs (type giftrans at the shell prompt to get a list of command-line options). mapedit helps produce sensitive maps.
• weblint (to check HTML files)

Other Utilities are listed on the Software Tools for the World-Wide Web page (from the Advisory Group on Computer Graphics)

Getting your files onto the WWW

• Where to put the files - The Engineering Department run various servers. Our main central ones are
  • www.eng.cam.ac.uk - departmental and administrative pages. Also staff's official "home" pages.
  • www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk - help on computing
  • www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk - research group pages
  • www2.eng.cam.ac.uk - users' files.
  Only www2 is available to all CUED members as a place to add files to the WWW - the notes for Undergraduates gives details on what to do.
• What to write - If you are authoring official information for the CUED Web site you should consider
  • what are you trying to get across and to whom?
  • are you duplicating information that already exists elsewhere on the Web (in or outside Cambridge) and could be linked to?
  • is this information sufficiently sensitive that it should either be restricted to University network users or CUED's internal network?
  • how often will the information need updating and do you have time to do this? It will by your responsibility to maintain the currency and accuracy of the information on your pages.
  • will you need to create on-screen forms for users to complete, or display information from databases?
  • where will the pages be served from.
  • will the pages conform to the Department's rules.
  You might get some ideas for information to include by seeing what other Universities are doing. The next step is to check your proposals with your Web Strategy Committee representative.
• How to create pages -
  • WWW space for University Societies and Clubs
  • Notes for research groups
  • Updating official profile pages (staff)
  • Creating unofficial web pages (all users)

Controlling, monitoring and increasing access

• How to control access to pages - There are various ways to control access to pages
  • PIN protection (CUED only)
  • Raven protection (CUED only)
  • password protection
  • domain-based protection. Files can be made available only to certain domains (like eng.cam.ac.uk). To control access to a directory of pages so that only CUED people have access, create a file called .htaccess in the directory, make it readable by everyone, and put the following into it

    order deny,allow 
    deny from all 
    allow from .eng.cam.ac.uk 
    

    You can have a list of "allow" lines. See the apache documentation on allow and deny for more options.
  Adding

      <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">
  

  in the HEAD of your document hints to search engines that you don't want the file indexed.

  If you're dealing with sensitive information you might benefit from having your files put in the www Unix group. This offers further security options. Mail webadmin for details.

• Monitoring and increasing access -
  • If for advertising purposes you want a short URL for your page (e.g. "http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/go/nanoconf05"), mail webadmin@eng.cam.ac.uk
  • There are monthly unofficial CUED WWW logs - but also see Why web usage statistics are (worse than) meaningless
  • Statcounter is a web tracker
  • Google Analytics is popular
  • To advertise your pages, see
    • Search Engine Watch - to see how to tempt the Search Engines - in particular see the meta tags section.
    • Register-It - to register your page with some search engines.
    Adding something like

         <meta name="keywords" content="literature,literary,poetry,poets,prose,writers,theory">
    

    to the HEAD of your document helps some search engines to index your file.

Security, Guidelines and the Law

• To help reduce the risk of e-mail addresses being picked up by spammers, read about E-mail addresses on web pages
• CUED WWW House Style
• Worldwide Web - Departmental Guidelines
• World Wide Web Security FAQ
• Data Protection Act - Advice for UCS Users
• IT Syndicate Guidelines for WWW Providers
• University of Cambridge Web Accessibility Policy
• Some notes on digital resources and the law

Publications and Organisations

• Web Review
• Web Techniques

Contacts and Further Information

• The University Offices' guidelines for information providers has much useful information.
• People - webadmin oversees the Teaching System's World Wide Web material. See the Departmental WWW Administrative Structure page for departmental information.

  Mail pc-support or mac-support if you have Mac/PC-related queries about how to put your documents onto the WWW. Mail webadmin if you have problems making the document look right.