Getting Going

As mentioned, one of the biggest issues to be addressed when building electronic documents is the formating of the document on the viewer's screen and/or printer.

Before you begin to develop HTML style web pages, you should consider the following questions:

Am I already pretty good at formating my work in MS Word (or some other word processor).?

Am I already pretty good at formating my work in PowerPoint presentation format?

If the answer to either of these questions is an affirmative "Yes!," then I would suggest considering the generation of PDF (Acrobat) type files for course presentation.

Why not just use the "Save as Web Page," "Save as HTML," or other web page generation options that exist?

This question relates to the primary expectation that your students have a wide range of hardware and software components. When you choose to export to HTML from an editor that is not designed for web page development (like any of: Word, Powerpoint, WordPerfect, etc.), you get a version of HTML that is based on a vendor's version of the way to write hypertext. Not all vendors do a good job of following the HTML standards that are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.

In particular, recent versions of MS Powerpoint export web pages that can only be viewed with recent versions of MS Internet Explorer. While this is not an issue with computers on campus, it may be with the students' personal computers, and has been personally with the different computers within my own home.

I am pretty comfortable with Word/Powerpoint/some other editor, how can I generate PDF documents?

There are different solutions to generating PDF output from a Window's based program.

Get the Adobe Acrobat PDF Printer Driver

This comes with some hardware, especially some HP scanners.
Purchase this from Adobe.

Use Ghostscript

This is a free postscript and PDF interpreter. The downside is that it requires you to first create a postscript (.ps) file by printing from your program, and then converting this file to PDF.

HTML Formating tips

If you've decided that you want to build web pages, perhaps something you might need to do just to give access to your PDF files, then you should consider the issues with formating the content on the reader's computer and/or printer.

Web browsers tend to put text right up against the left edge of the window. This may not look quite the way you'd want it to, and may even be difficult to read on some monitors.

One of the easiest ways to format the content of a web page is to use tables that do not show the table cell borders or outlines. In fact, all of my pages in this presentation are using a table that is centered in the window and occupies about 85-95% of the widow width. The table and cell borders are given a width of zero ("0") pixels, which means invisible. More on pixels in the next section. All of these properties are easy to set when you use an HTML editor.

Take advantage of the various text formats that are predefined. They help to make the text sections stand out, and are better behaved than changing the font size explicitly.

This is a Heading Level 1

This is a Heading Level 2

This is a Heading Level 3

This is a Heading Level 4

This is a Heading Level 5

This is a Heading Level 6

Each of these lines of text were generated with the HTML heading level tags like:
      <h1>This is a Heading Level 1</h1>
      <h2>This is a Heading Level 2</h2>
      <h3>This is a Heading Level 3</h3>
      <h4>This is a Heading Level 4</h4>
      <h5>This is a Heading Level 5</h5>
      <h6>This is a Heading Level 6</h6>

But I didn't write the HTML, my editor (thankfully) did it for me.

When ever you point to another web page (one of yours or not), you do this with a link to the document.
In general, you should use relative links whenever possible because:

it's easier to move a group of documents to another location (because the relative path names will still be valid)
it's more efficient connecting to the server
there is less to type

However, use absolute pathnames when linking to documents that are not directly related. For example, consider a group of documents that comprise one course's content. Links within this group should be relative links. Links to other documents (perhaps a reference to related elective coursework) should use absolute pathnames instead. This way if you move the primary coursework to a different directory, none of the links would have to be updated.

Important Hint: Most browsers use a "cache" of pages that you have visited. The default is generally to only check for a new page once every time you launch the browser. You can find an option in the preferences to check a page for updates every time the page is viewed. This does not for a download of the page, just an exchange between the computer holding the page and your browser to check the timestamps of the remote and local copies. If the remote page is newer, then it is downloaded.

If you view web pages that change frequently (like weather related pages) then this is an important preference to check on!

You can force a refresh/reload of a page, regardless of the relative page timestamps by using CTRL-R, or "CTRL-[Reload Icon]." If you make two quick changes in less than a minute, this may be the only way to see the last version of the page, especially if reading the page on your own computer!

The row below is actually a single row, three column table that is embedded in the second to last row of the major table on the page.

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