Recommendations for your personal homepage
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a very efficient information system.
It is not only a tool for us to obtain information from other
servers but it is also the first contact for many people with
our group. Within the next time it will probably become one of
the most important representations of our group with respect to the
outer world. This concerns especially students which should be
attracted and scientist from other institutes which look for
contact to special people or for some information available
in our group.
The organization of our WWW pages shall, therefore, fulfil three
conditions:
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They have to be interesting, attractive, and, of course, informative.
Include that information which should be available to other members
of our group and people from other institutes.
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The WWW allows a very efficient access to information, but this
is not automatically given for everything what is set up as HMTL
document. The main criterion for an efficient access is an efficient
structure of the used links and objects.
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Our connection to the outer world is already heavily loaded. Try
to reduce the netload. Create objects in such a way that the
the required information can be obtained with a minimum of net
transfer.
Practical recommendations to write HMTL pages which fulfil these
conditions.
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Writing HMTL documents is very simple. Do not think that there is
a great time consumption because of a nice representation of most
documents. All you need is a text editor and an arbitrary document
as example. The structure is almost self explaining.
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It is possible to include all your texts you have already in your
computer in your WWW pages without major changes.
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Our WWW representation will only be good when many members contribute.
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Distinuish between information which shall be available for
all the outer world of for our group only. The outer world can
only read files within /home/georg/ftp/www. Links to other
files can only be resolved by members of the group.
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Produce small documents with many links instead of large lists
or texts.
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Try to produce hierarchical structures instead of long chains
or rings of links.
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Do not use different names for links to one and the same object.
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Avoid the usage of large included pictures which do not contain
special information. Pictures for illustration should not
exceed about 40k.
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In case of links to large documents (>200k), please indicate
their size at the entry point to remember the user of the large
netload required for the transmission.
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Try to distinguish between internal and external links.
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Do not use the HELP from the menu bar when the same informations is
also locally available from the Information about hypertext page. The HELP menu calls the
the information from America.
For detailed information on your personal homepage see
Alexander Welz' suggegtions.
V. Ossenkopf
June 2nd, 1994