Web Page Authoring Utilities Talk

SWUG Friday 14th June 1996, CGB3A Conf Room

Sponsored by SLAC Database Forum and SLAC Web User Group

This talk will introduce you to some SLAC Web utilities to:

Allow you to spruce up your Web pages to include links to the page owner (probably you), to contacts, to Unix man pages and to enable your page reader to send email to a designated email address.
Provide easy Web access to your spreadsheets, database files, or flat text files produced by legacy applications.
Write simple and more powerful forms to support surveys, registration etc. using email to communicate with the recipient.
Provide hot-spot clicakable image maps in your Web pages.
Provide a Web portfolio of encapsulated Postscript pictures, which can be displayed as thumbnails, or in most common graphic formats.

The talk will be illustrated with real world examples, will compare alternative methods, and will provide pointers and documentation for you to study later at your leisure. The SLAC utilities to support these facilities are:

/owner/person and the closely related /contact/person: Display the BINLIST entry for the selected person.
/cgi-bin/slac-man/page?unix-command: Displays the Unix man pages for the sepcified unix-command.
mailto:email-address and /suggestion/email-address.: Allow a user to send simple email to email-address. Comparison of the two methods.
/cgi-bin/httab/file: Provides display of a tab separated values (tsv) file as a Web HTML table. Tsv files are typically produced by spreadsheets such as Excel or Wingz, or by a database application. This is an alternative (faster, simpler, more widely available, more secure, though less powerful) to configuring your Netscape browser to bring up your spreadsheet application to browse such files.
/cgi-bin/htgrep: Provides the ability to select lines and/or columns from a file and display as a simple Web page or as an HTML table. You can cobble htgrep together with a form to provide interactive access to your spreadsheet, database or legacy information.
/cgi-bin/form-mail: Enables you to easily email information gathered by a form and send it to a selected destination. Typical uses include sign up lists, conference registration, suggestion/feedback gathering, surveys and much more. For users needing more capability, the output to the form user and the email can be customized. For the sophisticated email user, the output can be made easier to parse by an email filter program. See SLAC Announcements form for an example of a form using many of form-mail's features.
Client Side Imagemaps: With client side image maps, it is now relatively easy to add clickable hot-spots to your images. Strictly speaking this is not a SLAC specific utility, but I threw it in here since it can replace the need for the imagemap script utility.
VIEWEPS: Is a tool to make collections of encapsulated Postscript files available on the web.

Further Information

See http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/www/tool/summary.html for Using SLAC Web Utilities in HTML Pages.

[ Feedback ] Last updated June, 6 1996 by Les Cottrell