Creating HTML Documents

Menu items to be invoked from a program are shown in bold. the following is a bare bones guide, and you should explore the programs for more.
Cross platform Software
Netscape Communicator 4.7 (On Credit 99) This is the recommended program to use
MacOS Software Windows Software
Go to Apple Menu/Editors,Word Processors.
  1. Claris Home page (recommended)
  2. BBedit (optional)
 Go to Start Menu/Web-authoring
  1. Frontpage Express (similar to Communicator)
  2. HTML-kit
  3. Amaya
  4. 1st Page 2000

Using Netscape Composer

  1. File=> New=>blank page OR
  2. File=>Open=>Location in Composer OR
  3. Load page in Navigator and File=>Edit page or File=>Edit Frame
  4. Type text or Copy/Paste text from Web page
  5. Insert=>Image (from disk file) or Copy/Paste image from Web page (using extended mouse press or rhs mouse button to copy image to clipboard or to save the image to disk)
  6. Select text or image and Insert=>Link to hyperlink to other files. Make sure you respect case sensitivity (ie use same case as filename has)
  7. To insert a molecule, copy text below from http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/local/it/lectures.html 
       
 <embed border="0"
 src="peni.pdb" name="yourmolecule" width="200" height="105" frank="no"
 spiny="4" startspin="true" display3d="spacefill" bgcolor="#000000" />
  8. Use Insert=>HTML tag and paste the lines above. Change name of peni.pdb (or peni.mol) to your molecule (previously saved from a database).
  9. To edit "raw" HTML, use Tools=>HTML Tools=>Edit HTML Source. You can reset the default raw HTML editor to another of your choice in Edit/Preferences/Composer.
  10. Explore other menu options for yourself
  11. File=>Save as. Do not use spaces in filename, and give a suffix .html. You MUST save all the html, the image files, molecules, and any other files in the SAME directory. If you move the files, any hyperlinks will break. If you want to create sub-directories, then make sure that the hyperlinks refer to the file in the fashion subdirectory/filename.html for example. Do NOT accept so called absolute paths in the hyperlink reference. This will contain a hard disk name, and will not work when you give the collection to another user.
  12. If you are using framesets, you must Open, Edit and Save all the components. File=>edit page will open the parent document of a frameset. File=>edit Frame will open the children. Use Tools=>HTML Tools=>Edit HTML Source to inspect the names you must give the children, i.e. 1st.html and 2nd.html in the example below 
    <frameset rows="90,*"> <frame src="1st.html" name="1"> <frame src="2nd.html" name="2"> </frameset>
  13. Regularly preview your HTML by pressing the Composer preview button (5th from left on toolbar).
  14. Dont write long HTML documents that need a lot of scrolling. Break things up into smaller documents. Use frames if necessary to create a table of contents.
  15. Check your HTML is not platform dependent, ie try it on another type of machine before submitting it.