Preface & Introduction

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Preface & Introduction

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For those interested in all the technical details about how this book was produced: The text was composed using the following: Adobe PageMaker v5.0a for Windows Story Editor, MS-Write, VMS EVE editor, MS-Notepad, and MS-WordPad. The line-art drawings appearing in the book were drawn by Mr. VanZanten and then scanned into 2 color TIFF format with an Envisions 6600S at 300dpi. The screen shots used in the book were acquired with JASC Paint Shop Pro. Once acquired, they were converted to greyscale images and were run through an edge enhancing filter after which the images were converter to 2 color TIFF format. The layout of the book was done with Adobe PageMaker v5.0a for Windows in the MS-Windows v3.1 and Windows95 environment. The computer used to do layout was an Intel-80486-compatible running at 80Mhz with 8MB RAM. After experiencing three consecutive disk crashes which delayed the production of the book, an Iomega SCSI Zip 100 was purchased to secure the associated data on removeable media. The pre-press masters were printed on a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4L at 300dpi and then matted on Wausau Basis 67 gray cardstock paper. The printing of the book was done on offset press by Joe Gonzales of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Other interesting trivia: We estimate 93 percent of the work done on this project occured between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.

Both authors confess to having listened to a variety of music while composing the material for this book. This includes: Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, Rush, Primus, Ministry, Bare Naked Ladies, Steve Vai, Alice in Chains, Front 242, Nirvana, Propaganda, Bjork, Joy Division, Enigma, Faith No More, The Cure, David Byrne, U2, Wire, and Peter Gabriel.

Chadd would like to thank the following people: Lori, Gretchen, Ingrid and Klaus for a healthy mix of inspiration and consternation. The Group: Rugg, Jay, Slade and Ezra. Special thanks go out to Jay for paying for Pizza Time (Salt Lake City, Utah 801.532-3999) pizza on the final night of production, even though he ate most of it and then denied it repeatedly. Thanks to Matt and his Gun Dog for indirectly contributing the example about dogs and the training thereof. Doran, for the invitation to participate in this project, and for this perennial advice: "Don't fall."

Doran woud like to thank the following people: Christine for all her support. Chadd for his undying support for the project and his great art. Yeah, thanks Jay. As usual, extra special thanks go to Bob and Thus.

Both authors would like to thank the users of the Internet and the World Wide Web for their... user-ness.

Introduction

Since its inception, the Internet has been accessible through a wide variety of methods. The World Wide Web is the most recent interface to the Net and it's the most user-friendly yet. Still, the Web can be a difficult thing to use, both to find information and to publish it.

Some of the often asked questions about the Web include "What's it for?", "What's available?", "Where do I start?", and "How to publish on the Web?" We hope to answer all these questions and give you plenty of instructions on how to start working with the Web. Then we'll show you how to create both sophisticated and effective Web documents.

In this book, you'll find we try to stick to a few typographical conventions.

First of all, all Internet addresses, Web URLs, computer commands, menu names and options, and filenames will be displayed in bold text. For example:

Select the Options menu and select Preferences...

Keyboard keystrokes will be shown as a combination of keystrokes seperated by the plus (+) character:

Press CONTROL+A to add a bookmark.

Throughout the book we show examples of HTML and program code. This will be shown in a fixed width, courier font:

     <html><head><title>The Alpine Project!</title></head>

We have also include several screen captures to visually describe the topics we write about.

It was our goal to produce an a collection of up-to-date on the World Wide Web which walks through the steps to finding information and publishing it.