Hi everyone...

Please go to MyRU.radford.edu,
click on the "My Accounts" tab,
and reset your public page permissions 
so that I can check before class Monday to 
see how much you got accomplished by Friday!

Here are my class notes from the first 
week of COMS 326. I added more about 
the early the Internet, 
because I think it's important to know 
some history. Then I added all the steps
to what we did Friday so that anyone 
who was absent can catch up.

Please read this over and ask me about 
anything you don't understand. 

Read to the end 
-- especially if you were absent or
rushed at the end of Friday -- 

Here's what we did...

ON Monday and Wednesday:

You learned how to open a text editor
and move it to half the screen with a 
browser open on the other half... 

and you learned how to get to 
http://www.radford.edu/rstepno/326

(It may be easier to remember: 
http://stepno.com 
click on RU, 
then click on 326)

You learned that a "text editor" saves plain 
text documents, which can be named "name.txt"
if they are just notes like this one...
or "name.html" if they are intended for the Web.

A plain text document does not use "rich text"
features like margins, tabs, colors. It just 
stores the characters you see on your keyboard.
Some programs, like Apple's "TextEdit" and 
Windows "WordPad" can create your choice of
"plain text" or "rich text" documents. Use 
any program to write HTML, but always save
it as "plain text" with a ".html" ending.

As you can see here, a plain text document
with a name ending in ".txt" and no HTML
codes will still display in a Web browser,
in a very plain typewriter-style font. 

You also learned who built the Internet...

(See the textbook and/or browse the Web for
more information.)

==========================================

My version of the Who Built the Internet story: 

The first builders were mostly 
computer science and electronic 
engineering professors, research 
institutes and contractors, and
(most importantly, I think)
grad students working for those 
professors. 

Early network experiments were funded by 
research grants, initially (in the 1960s)
from the U.S. Defense Department, 
then from the National Science Foundation
and other agencies. The first major 
ARPANET demonstrations were in 1969.

Commercial companies that built computer
hardware and software joined the project 
as it went along. 

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of 
the Internet was getting many different 
brands of computers to talk to each other. 
That meant establishing "standards"
and "protocols" (agreements or rules) 
that no one company "owned," and that all 
could follow. 

That took many committees,
"Request for Comment" documents,
task forces and negotiated agreements, 
which is still how the Internet is governed.

The committee volunteers and grad students 
came up with things like email, computer
bulletin boards (Usenet) and the idea that
computer networks could be use by people
sharing information, being human, and 
having fun, not just doing work and 
making money.

And the difference between the Internet 
and the Web? 

Short answer: 

I. The Internet is the big network 
of all smaller networks. Think of 
it as the physical computers, wires and 
switches ("routers"), plus the rules 
("protocols" -- with names like TCP/IP, 
FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, SSH etc.)
and the domain name address system 
started in the mid-1980s
-- this.com, that.edu, them.org etc. 

Programmers write software that uses those
addresses and protocols to send and verify
information over all those wires. 
Meanwhile, the "wires" have evolved to
include optical fibers and wireless links.

II. The Web... 

-- is a system for addressing, linking 
and displaying documents and other 
media on the Internet

-- began as a Hypertext Markup Language 
(HTML) and HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP)

-- HTML lets us embed links and structure 
in plain text documents 
(so they don't have to look like this one), 

-- HTTP is a set of rules (a protocol)
for programs (servers and "clients," 
including Web browsers) to follow when 
sending, receiving and displaying 
information. 

ONE guy, Tim Berners-Lee, invented HTML, HTTP and 
wrote the first server and client (browser) 
programs in 1990 at CERN, the European 
particle physics lab. And he invited the 
world to join in.

An idea worth remembering:
The importance to the Web of open 
(non-proprietary) standards and 
free software, much of it originally 
created under government grants 
and university contracts. 

Berners-Lee got his employers to agree to
his making his creations (HTML, HTTP, 
the World Wide Web) open standards and 
open source, so that others could build 
with them and improve them. 

They did.

The first browser to put images on pages
came from grad students at a national 
computing center at the University
of Illinois. It was called "Mosaic." 
The Mosaic developers offered free 
versions for all the major computer 
systems.

In fact, some of those Illinois students
formed one of the first big Internet 
companies, "Netscape," and became 
millionaires by creating a new 
browser inspired by Mosaic. 

A university spinoff licensed the 
original code for the Mosaic browser 
to various companies, including Microsoft, 
which used it to start Internet Explorer.

At about the same time, NSF and Congress
agreed to let the Internet (and Web) be 
used for commercial purposes. 

Netscape, bought by AOL, later became the 
open-source "Mozilla" project that gave us 
Firefox.

In the past decade, even more developers 
have added scripting languages and databases 
systems to make Web pages more dynamic, 
security features to allow e-commerce (and 
social networking), and a style sheet 
language that makes pages visually 
interesting and flexible. 

Today LOTS of companies and scientists
and grad students keep building
from there, and now that crowd includes...
YOU!

=====================================

ON Friday:

We reviewed the stuff above from Monday 
and Wednesday...

Made a folder named coms326 in your
public_html folder on your "H drive"

(If you included spaces or capital
letters in the name, or didn't drag
it into your public_html folder,
it won't work. Fix it!)

How-to from Friday:

1. Open Notepad and get the page 
you made the last time or make 
another one quickly.

2. Split the screen between it 
and the browser.

3. Take a picture of the whole screen
 with "Snipping Tool"
and save it on your desktop.

4. "Resize" the image to half the width
of a typical 900-pixel-wide web page.

5. "Optimize it" with Photoshop using 
the "Save for web and devices" command.
(We talked about when to use JPG or 
GIF or PNG format.) 

6. Save the optimized version in your coms326
folder with a simple lower-case name like 
"myscreensnap.png"

7. Put your html page in that same folder

8. Edit the html page to add an "image tag"
<img src="myscreensnap.png">

9. Extra1: Add a title to the image 
by editing that image tag
<img srv="filename.png" 
title="a picture of my first 
webpage in progress" />

The title will show up when someone 
"mouses over" the image.

10. Extra2: Add an "alt" string to the image tag:
<img srv="filename.png" 
title="a picture of my first 
webpage in progress" 
alt="screen capture of an HTML
editing session, the code 
for this page"/>

The "alt" string will appear IF 
the person browing your page has
graphics turned off or is using a
text-only device, such as a blind 
user's speaking-browser.

11. Go to myru.radford.edu
Click the "My Accounts" tab
Click "Update Web Permissions"
then click "Click here to 
	set file permissions"
then click "OK"

12. Go to http://www.radford.edu/yourname/coms326
-- you should see the contents of the folder 
you made. 
-- When you click on the html file's name,
you should see the page with your 
screen snapshot on it.

On Monday we'll clean up that page and 
learn a few more tags while adding more 
content. (DOCTYPE, lists, bold and italic.)

And if everyone has "got it," we'll try 
another text editor -- on the Unix 
server itself, take another snapshot 
of that operation, and add it to the page.

Then we'll use the MyRU "Files"
tab to learn how to copy and move pages 
around from home.

By Wednesday you should have a dozen 
HTML tags clear and know how to edit
your page from home or anywhere!

Check these notes against my "First Two
Weeks" pages to see how we're doing:

http://www.radford.edu/~rstepno/326/326firstweek.html
http://www.radford.edu/~rstepno/326/dayone/index.html

(As the file names suggest, I used to 
think we could get through all of that 
in one day... and with a two-hour class 
with large-screen Macintoshes we came close.
But the 50-minute session on these small 
screens has us moving a little slower. 
That may be good.)