WWW summary.

[Todd Huss <todd.huss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 30 Jan 1995 HarpSPAH@xxxxxxx wrote:

> For us newcomers to Harp-L all this gopher and www and Netscape stuff is way
> over our heads.  It's not that we don't want to hear about it, we really want

This is a summary for PC users running DOS/Windows:

Let me try and give a brief summary of netscape, mosaic, and lynx. I feel 
like this is relative material to harp-l because it deals with the harp-l 
homepage so here goes. 

Essentially if you want to view the new harp-l homepage which Chris has 
written you'll realistically need either Netscape or Mosaic (although 
there are other programs out there). To use there programms you'll have 
to have a network connection to the internet. This means that either your 
computer is directly connected to the internet with a network card or 
that you have a dialup SLIP account. Don't confuse a dialup slip account 
with a dialup shell account through which you can simply do e-mail and 
read internet news though. A dial up slip account means that you dial up 
your internet service provider and then start up the SLIP protocal: first 
on their machine and then on yours (most likely using a  program called 
winsock). You usually start up the SLIP protocal using the command 
"sliplogin" or "slip" from your shell account although  this can vary. 
SLIP  accounts usually cost more then dial-up shell accounts (through 
which you can do e-mail, newsreading, and basic text based stuff etc...). 
The disadvantage of SLIP is that to use it effectively it really helps to 
have a basic understanding of TCP/IP networking  (which is what the 
internet computers use to communicate). To generalize, most dial-up shell 
accounts include SLIP. It's something you'll have to pay extra for most 
lilely. Ask your internet service provider though if they have it and 
sometimes they'll walk you through getting set up.

If your with me this far and have a working SLIP account somewhere and you
want to do stuff like look at the harp-l homepage you'll have to choose
what's called a WWW (World Wide Web) browser. This would most likely be
one of the two most popular WWW browsers: Netscape or Mosaic. Netscape is
a newer program then Mosaic which supports a newer format of WWW pages.
This newer format (called HTML +) is what Chris used to write the harp-l
homepage. For these reasons it might be wiser to choose Netscape as your
WWW browser. IF you do, however, use Mosaic (the more traditional WWW
browser) you will still be able to look at the harp-l homepage, it just 
wont look  as fancy. If you have a 386 or greater running DOS/Windows and 
a dialup SLIP account you should be able to use either Netscape or Mosaic 
without any big problems. I also might mention that if you are going to 
be using dial-up SLIP to do all this you should really be using atleast a 
9600baud modem if not a 14.4 modem. Otherwise it will probably be too 
slow. 

Now for all of you who don't have dial-up SLIP but who just have to see 
the harp-l homepage and it's cool graphics and stuff there is an option 
for you too, however, I'm not going to go into much detail here. The 
prerequisite is that you have  a dial-up UNIX shell account. THis means 
that you can dial up your service provider and get a unix shell prompt. 
How do I know if I have a Unix shell account? If you use programs like 
elm or pine to do e-mail or use tin,vn,rn, or nn to read NEWS then you 
most likely have a dial-up shell account. You'll definately want to have 
a modem that operates at atleast 9600 baud as well. The program which is 
pretty much brand new that will let you use the World Wide Web via a 
dial-up shell account is called slip-not.zip. It is a rather new approach 
to using the WWW and a good solution for people with dial-up shell 
accounts that aren't willing to pay for the generally higher priced 
dial-up SLIP service. I won't get into how it works but it does. I don't 
have the ftp address either where you can get this so you'll have to hunt 
for it a bit. I'd suggest a Veronica search or something using the 
keywork slipnot or slip-not. Archie search didn't turn up anything.

To get these any of these programms you will have to use ftp program. 
As of this message the current version of Netscape for MS windows is
version 1.0. You can get it via anonymous ftp by doing:
ftp bitsy.mit.edu
and then logging in as "ftp" and sending your e-mail address as the 
password. Once you are logged in type:
cd /pub/dos/web/netscape
the type:
bin
and then type:
get ns16-100.exe
and then type:
bye
You will then have version 1.0 of the Netscape WWW browser. 

I realize this summary was a but long but I hope it helped give a basic 
overview of what's in store if you want to have a look at the harp-l 
homepage. I didn't cover lynx or any of the text based www browsers 
because in my opinion it's not really worth it but if you just absolutely 
have to see the harp-l homepage you can use the text based web browser 
called lynx but I won't get into that. Good luck and hope this helped a bit.

							-Todd

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    Todd C. Huss
		     todd.huss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
    		       http://www.emba.uvm.edu/~huss/	

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