Example:
< html > < body background=file >
... html stuff here ...
< /body > < /html >
Note: the < body ... > tag must be the first or second line of the file, and must be terminated by a < /body > command
Note: If you see a page with a background you like, use View/Document Source from the menu to look at their html code, and see what they have in their < body ... > command.
Note: You may need to change the text color on a dark background by <body background=file text=white ... > or even the hyper link colors < body background=file link=white hlink=white ... > etc. Check the link to HTML Commands on the class web page for the definitive syntax.
A? It goes in your home directory, in a special subdirectory called public_html (note underscore!) and in a special file called index.html in your public_html directory.
A? Using any of the editors available on the calclab servers. I recommend "nedit", which is a mouse based - point and click editor. You can also use Netscape 3.0's built-in editor. You can also create them on your own computer and upload the files.
A? You can view the HTML source for any document on the web by clicking on "View" in the menu bar, and then selecting either "Document Source" or "Frame Source".
A? There are many online dictionaries of HTML terms. A good one can be found by first selecting the "4 Frames" Option on the class home page, and then clicking on "HTML Commands".
A! There is a great program called "xv" (which stands for X-Viewer, I guess) which can read just about any common image format - GIF, JPEG, BMP, PCX, etc.
One of the nice features "xv" has is the ability to crop an image, as well as resize it.
You can also control the size of images in a Web document through the width and height parameters for the < img ...> tag - for example if you had a file called mypic.gif, you could make it 100 pixels wide by
< img src=mypic.gif width=100>
If you wanted it 100 pixels high, you would use
< img src=mypic.gif height=100>
If you wanted it to be half the page wide, no matter what the size of the page,
< img src=mypic.gif width=50%>
You can also center it by
< center>
< img src=mypic.gif>
< center>
A! Using the telnet program (built into Windows95 and WindowsNT) or using the telnet part of TAMU_NET package, set the remote machine to calclab4.math.tamu.edu. Use your calclab login and password.
A! Using the ftp program (built into Windows95 and WindowsNT) or using the ftp part of TAMU_NET package, set the remote machine to calclab4.math.tamu.edu. Use your calclab login and password. Use the arrow keys <-- and --> to set the direction of transfer (<-- is download, --> is upload).
A! Editors such as nedit, textedit, xedit, axe, are graphics based rather than text based. Of the text based editors (that is, ones which can run in a terminal window) the one that I suggest is "pico". It is very similar to the editor for "pine". It is fairly easy to use with no prior experience.
There are other editors such as vi or emacs which can be run in a terminal window, but the learning curve is greater.
A! You must your defaults under Options/Mail and News Preferences.
A! There are several things which determine the way in which Netscape handles files. The first is the extension, the second is the mime-type, and the third is the application which is bound to the first two.
For example, Maple 5 Worksheets have a ".mws" extension. They are also sent over as "application/octet-stream" (that is, binary).
In your home directory there is a file called .mime.types which connects the mime-types to the extension. There should be a line reading
application/octet-stream mwsin this file. There is another file called .mailcap, which conencts the mime-types to executables. In this file, you should see the line
application/octet-stream; xmaple %sNetscape overwrites these files when you Edit->Preferences->Applications. It is possible to get things really messed up if you enter the wrong information into these files...
Ideally, every file has a unique combination of extensions and mime-types. (However, both matlab and maple save plain text script files with .m extension!)
| File | Mime-Type | Extension | Application |
| Maple | /application/octet-stream | mws | xmaple %s |
| Matlab | text/plain | m | xterm -geom +0-0 -e matlab.expect %s |
A! If you are running Netscape v3 (click on Help on Netscape's menubar, or type netscape -v in a terminal window) you must enable JavaScript . If you are running Netcape v4.X, it should be enabled.
Check to see that there are <script language="JavaScript"> and </script> tags in the header portion of your html file.
A! Check your syntax. JavaScript is very sensitive to imbedded spaces within arguments , for example
window.open("file.html","window","width=100, height=100");
gives different results than
window.open("file.html","window","width=100,height=100");
because of the space after the comma. (The second argument
height is not read correctly!).