Introduction to Archaeology

Anthro 304 / ARY 301 Spring 1998
Prof. Samuel M. Wilson
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas
Course homepage

HTML basics

1. Get a Place to Publish

  1. setting up your own place to publish -- Look here for step by step instructions. You should probably get on the computer calledUTS unless you have a reason to use another. Read the instructions and follow them carefully on the Personal Publishing page.
  2. There are a lot of advantages to having your own accoun -- you can publish things besides what you must do for this class.
  3. It costs about 2 cents / day.

2. Get the tools to write in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

  1. Most good software these days can write HTML files (which are just text files with some HTML codes stuck in them. If you have fairly recent software, look in the manual or on-line help for "HTML".
  2. Netscape Communicator has pretty good HTML authoring capabilities built into it, in the part called Composer. You can get Netscape Communicator from Netscape's Web Pages.
  3. If you use Microsoft Word and don't already have it, get the Internet Assistant. And read about how it allows your word processor to insert HTML codes.
  4. If you use Wordperfect, HTML support is built into more recent versions, and if necessary you can download the Internet Publisher from these directories.
  5. There are also lots of good HTML editors around for both Macs and PC. I like a shareware Mac editor called Pagespinner that can be downloaded. You can also buy Adobe's Pagemill from the Microcenter.
  6. Or, you can just use a simple text editor like simpletext on the Mac and wordpad on Windows. The HTML codes you need to write your class assignments are not very complex.
  7. what does an HTML document look like?

The main thing is this: the message is more important than the medium. Content is more important than formatting.

3. Learning HTML

    There are many good primers for beginning to learn HTML. Here are several of them:
  1. UT's LEARN WEB pages provide a lot of good advice.
  2. NCSA helped make the web, and their Beginner's Guide to HTML is a good resource.
  3. Here's the beginning of a step-by-step approach suggested by Pat, and a lot of in-depth information from the same source.

  4. The best thing to do is just get started.
  5. Also, learn from what you see on the web (view document source). Keep a collection of bookmarks to pages you like.

4. Learn to move things from your local computer up to the web server

In some ways this is the most difficult part. Getting web documents written and up on the web involves 3 things: writing the document (and while you are doing that checking what it looks like in a web browser); moving the document from your computer to the web server; and looking at it with a browser. Many programs now do all three steps, but often it is necessary to use a program like Fetch on the Mac or WS-FTP on the PC to move files around.

5. Learning some good habits from the start

  1. Read the Publishing Guidelines provided by TeamWeb. They're great.

SMW 1/98