http://www.cs.ubc.ca/doc/browsing (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
Browsing the Web Effectively
One of the nice things about WWW is that it's easy to browse.
Just select a link and you're off to the next page. Because
the Web is so vast, you'll almost certainly run into two
basic problems: remembering where something is
and finding new things.
The first problem is easy enough to solve and
many browsers have some way of recording where interesting
documents live. The second is much harder and, as you might
expect, there's no general, easy solution.
You've just found an interesting document on the Web. You realize
you'll want to visit it again. What do you do? Well, you could
just memorize the path that got you there, but that gets difficult
fast. Instead, you can use a the ``hotlist'' feature of Mosaic (xwww)
or the ``bookmark'' feature of lynx. In Mosaic, pull down the ``Navigate''
and select ``Add Current to Hotlist''. When you want to return to
that document, select ``Hotlist..'' from the ``Navigate'' menu and
you can see all the documents you've remembered. In lynx, use the
``a'' command to remember the location of a document and the ``v''
command to list those documents.
Going Beyond Hotlists and Bookmarks
After a while you may find that you've got too many documents in
your hotlist and it's becoming difficult to find what you want.
It's time to make your own home page, that is, your own document
that comes up first when you run the browser. Let's start off by
putting this in your ~/home.html file:
<HEAD><TITLE>My Home Page</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>My Home Page</H1>
Here's some places I like to visit.
<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="http://web.archive.org/web/199603/http://www.cs.ubc.ca/home>UBC" CS Home page</A>
<LI> <A HREF="http://web.archive.org/web/199603/http://www.cs.ubc.ca/tr>UBC" CS Technical Reports</A>
<LI> <A HREF=gopher://gopher.ubc.ca/>View UBC gopher</A>
<LI> <A HREF="http://web.archive.org/web/199603/http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html>List" of USENET FAQs</A>
</UL>
</BODY>
Now tell the browser you with ~/home.html to be your home page
by typing:
setenv WWW_HOME file://localhost/$HOME/home.html
Now run your browser. It will pop up with a list of places you
can head off to. You should be able to take this example and extend
it so your home page has all the links you want organized in the
way you want them. Just add in more <LI> lines for
each document you find. The address or URL of the document is what
you need to stick after the HREF="[unarchived-link]"> statement and can obtained
from the ``Document URL'' window in Mosaic or with the ``='' command
in lynx. The <A HREF="[unarchived-link]" ... </A> construct is
an anchor and can be put around any group of words in your document.
There are a few more things you can do, but I won't get into them
here. See the
primer on HTML for more information.
Mixing and Matching Hotlists and Bookmarks
Since the browsers do not use a common format for bookmarks and hotlists,
things you find while using one must be transferred manually to the
other. I have some tools for converting the Mosaic hotlist into
HTML; contact me
if you'd like to try them out. Given enough interest I'll go to
the extra effort of properly installing them.
You can quickly recognize that the Web is a vast source of information,
if you can only locate the bit you need. One place to turn is
to any of the Web indicies available out there. A pretty good
list of such indicies is the
Internet Resources Meta-Index.
Another one I find helpful is the
list of USENET FAQs because I can often think of a newsgroup that
might have the answer and find it in the FAQ for that newsgroup.
Otherwise, I don't have much to suggest (I said it was a hard problem :-).
You can also ask fellow users -- often they'll have run across something
in their Web surfing.
-- George Phillips