Hypermedia Submission

The traditional laboratory notebook, report or derived published paper has always resided on the physical medium of paper and ink. This has the considerable advantages of being cheap, reliable, long lived, and understood by most. There are some disadvantages also. When it comes to technical documentation, there is no easy way for the reader of the report to "re-use" the information for their own purposes. Thus the reader of a printed project report describing a computer program cannot easily try the program out for themselves unless they go to the considerable inconvenience of typing it all in from the printed sheet, with all the possibility of errors that this implies.

Hypermedia documents provide a way of associating digital information with written text in a seamless way. If you want to look at a program listing, you should be able to just click on a hyperlink. Colour diagrams, sounds, animations or molecular coordinates could all be delivered by this mechanism. The projects which are part of the computing course are ideal material to be delivered in this way. The advantages are;

How to Prepare a Hypermedia Report

  1. Write your report using Claris Works on the Macintosh Computers in room 170. The report should include a brief description of yoru objectives and what you did, and a complete listing of your code. This would necessitate transfering your program to the Macintosh. A description of how Indigo resident files can be made available to the Macintosh is found by clicking here. You should be able to open the listing from the ClarisWorks File menu, and copy/paste the contents to your report window.
  2. Any graphics generated from the project can be included in the report. If you generated an "rgb" style file for the HORBS project, it can be converted to a "gif" file and "Inserted" into the body of the report.
  3. If you want to generate hyperlinks to other documents you might have prepared, or perhaps to remote documents you might have come across on the Internet, proceed as follows. First, highlight the text that will represent the hyperlink. Then, select "shortcuts" from the File menu and within the sub-menu, select "Play Macro". Finally, choose "Insert Hyperlink". A footnote will appear, which has to be edited to correspond to your hyperlink. To hyperlink your program for example, insert at this point yourprog.f
  4. When you are ready to generate a hypertext document, select "save as" from the Claris File menu, and specify HTML as the type of file to be saved. The name of the file to be saved should end in .html This process will produce the main document, together with and ".f" and ".gif" files that you inserted into the document. This collection of files will need to be mounted on a server. You will have to ask Dr Rzepa to do this for you.
  5. To access your report, run either NCSA Mosaic or Mosaic Netscape and type in what is called your project "URL". This will take the form;
    http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/local/projects/yourname/youreport.html
    Nominally, this URL is all you need to submit as your project report. You can do this conventionally by sending a short note to Dr Rzepa, or "electronically" by e-mailing the URL to him. The best such reports will be considered for inclusion in our "global" pages.

    Hypermedia as a Project

    If you have interesting ideas for a fully fledged Hypermedia project, using the HTML language, feel free to submit a short description to Dr Rzepa. If appropriate, this would be regarded as a valid alternative to Projects A or B.
    Copyright (c) B. P. Levitt, H. S. Rzepa and ICSTM Chemistry Department, 1994.
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