NETSCAPE TUTORIAL

What is a web page?

When you bring a page to your screen, you'll see the whole page or, if the content is extensive, only a portion. Scroll bars let you see the rest. The scroll bar is the area to the right of the content area that has an upward pointing arrow, a downward pointing arrow and an indicator bar in between.

What is Netscape?

1. by clicking on links that sometimes appear as underlined, colored text like this text link that will take you back to the beginning

2. by entering a URL, or address, for a specific Internet resource

3. by using one of the many Internet search tools

What is a URL?

URLs have at least two parts and are made up of text, forward slashes, punctuation, and sometimes numbers e.g. http://www.lexmark.com/data/quote.html.When you type a URL, you must be precise! A URL will not work if you type a small letter for a capital letter or visa versa.

Importance of Previous Mousing & Windows Experience

1. Finding, Starting, and Stopping links
2. Buttons
3. Pull-Down Menu Items

Finding, Starting and Stopping Links

A link is a connection from one page to another. You find a link by looking for one or more words highlighted with color, underlining, or both in the content area of a page. Images and icons with colored borders also serve as links. When the mouse cursor points over a link, the URL location of the link appears in the status field at the bottom of your screen and the cursor changes from an arrow to a hand.

You can bring a linked page to your screen by clicking once on the highlighted text, image, or icon. Clicking on a link transfers page content from a server location to your location. After you click on a link, the Netscape "N" animates to show you that the transfer of the page to your computer is in progress.

You can stop a transfer in progress by clicking on the Stop button. You'll find the ability to stop a transfer in progress is useful if the transfer is taking too long for your liking. This might happen if the content of the page is large or if the server computer is sluggish. Sometimes the page specified by a link just isn't available. You'll usually get a message if a connection was not made or a page not found. Examine the status field and progress bar to receive feedback about the progress of a transfer.

An unfollowed link is a connection to a page that you have not yet viewed; a followed link is one you have. Unfollowed and followed links are highlighted in different colors. After you click on an unfollowed link, the link becomes a followed link. If you go back to a page where you have clicked on a link, you'll see that the link has changed from the unfollowed color to the followed color. By default, unfollowed links are blue and followed links are purple.

You can either scroll up or click on this icon link to go back to the beginning of the Navigation section.

Linking Via Buttons and Pull-Down Menu Items

Buttons - The Netscape toolbar offers these useful button links among others:

• Back - Takes you backwards, one page at a time, to pages you've displayed previously.

• Forward - Advances you, one page at a time, but is available only after using the Back command or a history menu item.

• Home - connects you to the home page designated in your Options/Preferences. You may designate any home page you want.

• Open - produces a dialog box that allows you to bring any page whose URL you can supply.

You can either scroll up or click on this icon link to go back to the beginning of the Navigation section.

Pull-Down Menu Items - Menu items offer each of the links available through buttons plus many more. The Netscape application keeps track of pages you have seen, lets you create easy-access lists of favorite pages, and points you to pages with current information about Netscape and the Internet. Choosing a menu item that's the title of a page brings the page to screen.

• History items are under the Go menu and let you quickly retrieve pages that you've recently viewed in your current session. To bring a page to your screen, choose the title of the page. Try clicking on the Go menu item now in order to see your history list for this session. Click anywhere else on the screen in order to make the Go menu items go away.

• The Bookmark menu allows you to save the addresses of interesting Web pages . You can add a bookmark for the page you are viewing by choosing Bookmarks/Add Bookmark. You can see and use your list of bookmarks by choosing Bookmarks/Go to Bookmarks. Once you add a bookmark to your list, the title stays until you remove it. The permanence and accessibility of bookmarks make them invaluable for personalizing your Internet access. Because bookmarks play such an important role, the Netscape application offers many options for creating bookmark lists. Basic options let you create and use a list of bookmarks. More advanced options let you create hierarchical menus that make it possible to organize your bookmarks into folders and manage your bookmark list. These tools may differ depending on the platform you are using. Try clicking on the Bookmark menu item now to see if this Netscape already has a bookmark list.

• Items from the Directory and Help menus bring pages with up-to-date information on Netscape software and Internet exploration. The Directory/Internet menu item takes you to a partial directory of Internet search engines that you can use to find specific information or a particular page, either by searching page titles, subject fields, document content, or other indexes and directories. The Help/Handbook menu item serves as your online manual.

You can either scroll up or click on this icon link to go back to the beginning of the Navigation section.

To see this dialog box:

• Click on the File menu item
• Click on the Save As menu item
• Locate the part of the Save As dialog box where you can choose the file type
• Click on the arrow to the right of that part to see the choice for plain text
• Cancel out without saving anything

Many of the File and Edit menu items in the Netscape application work as they do in other Windows applications. You can print the content area of web pages, though you might need to adjust the size of the Netscape window to have a page print the way you wish.

To print the contents of the current page:

• Choose the File menu item
• Optionally, you can choose Print Preview to see a screen display of what will print. This is useful if you want to know how many pages will be printing.
• To skip the print preview, choose the Print item and you will get a Print dialog box where you select printing options and begin printing
• Cancel out without printing anything

To cut, copy, and paste:

• Click and drag in order to highlight text in the content area of the window
• Choose copy from the Edit menu
• Without closing Netscape, open Windows Notebook accessory or a word processing program
• Choose Paste from the Edit menu in order to copy the highlighted text from the Web page into the word processing document.

The first part of a URL is the protocol, or the HOW of the connection:

• http:// - takes you to a Web page e.g. http://www.aclin.org - This is the most common protocol.

• ftp:// - takes you to a server that transfers files from a remote computer to yours e.g. ftp://ftp.netscape.com -This protocol is often used to get software from the Internet.

• telnet:// - uses a helper application to open a text window and lets you log into a remote computer and use it as if you were standing in front of it e.g. telnet://sparrow.scan.org - This protocol is often used to access library catalogs.

• gopher:// - opens up a connection to a gopher server which is a menu driven method of offering text information on the Internet e.g. gopher://gopher.csn.net - Many university sites continue to have resources on gopher servers and have not converted to the Web format.

The second part, the host domain name, is the WHERE of the address:

• The host domain name also has parts and is made up of text and periods e.g. www.aclin.org or sparrow.scan.org - Every accessible computer on the Internet has one of these unique domain names.

There may be additional sections which comprise the directory path on the host computer and lead to specific directories, sub-directories and files separated by forward slashes e. g. http://www.lexmark.com/data/quote.html - In this example we would go to a Web page on the lexmark computer and then to a directory named "data" and then to a file named "quote.html."

A list of useful sites for libraries follows without the http:// part of the address. The newer versions of Netscape assume that you are entering a URL to a web resource. Either use the Open toolbar button to open a dialog box where you can type in the URL, or type the URL right into the Location box (after deleting the URL of the current page that automatically shows up there).

If you see an Internet resource that you would like to bookmark for future reference, click on the menu item for Bookmarks/ Add Bookmark.

After going to any of the pages using the URL, you can return to this screen by clicking on the Netscape Back button or by using the Netscape GO menu's history list.

Start with the simple search features of an easy-to-use search engine like WebCrawler. A simple search involves typing in several keywords that describe your topic. Most simple searches look for documents that contain one, some, or all of the keywords, but will rank the highest those documents that contain all of the keywords. Since the WebCrawler is a relatively small index of popular Web pages that have been reviewed and selected, you will be able to locate a few good sites if your topic is popular on the Internet. When you link to the few good sites, you can look for alternative search terms to use to refine your search.

A good, overall strategy is to learn three search engines well and to use the advanced search features of all of them each time you search, always beginning with a simple search on the WebCrawler or use one of the Meta search sites like MetaCrawler which searches more than one search engine at a time. For your other two searches, try using fast, large, search engines that index the full-text of Web pages and have advanced search capabilities. Two award-winning engines that meet these requirements are AltaVista and InfoSeek.

It is a good idea to make yourself some printed cheat sheets that contain the necessary information for each of the search engines that you use regularly. You can divide the cheat sheets into three sections such as: What does it search?; How does it search?; and How does it display results? You can gather this information by reading the HELP files for each engine. Along with the important details, include examples of how to truncate, how to indicate adjacency, how to search phrases, now to nest Boolean search terms, how to limit searches, etc. Many other people have done search engine comparisons that can be found on the Web that are often in chart form. One good example was done by Candy Schwartz and can be found at http://www.simmons.edu/~schwartz/mydtls.html.

To practice a search, print out the following directions (if you don't know how to print see this tutorial's section on Hard Copies), click on the WebCrawler address in the above table, and follow the print directions.

Suppose that you want information on straw bale house construction.

1. If your cursor is not already in the blank search term box, click there now.
2. In the box type: straw bale house construction
3. Click on the Search button to start the search.
4. Scroll down to see your search results.
5. At this point, if you want more than just the titles, you can click on "Show summaries for these results."
6. Without clicking on any links, browse through your first 25 hits.
7. You should see several titles that look promising, like Straw Bale Construction, and Resource Guide for Straw Bale Construction.
8. Go ahead and link to one or both if these.
9. End of search.
10. Use the Netscape back button, or Netscape's history list under the Go menu item, in order to get back to the tutorial.

Bookmarks can easily become unmanageable. Netscape has a Sort feature under Bookmarks/Go To Bookmarks/Item. It will sort bookmarks into alphabetical order, but if you have a long list, merely alphabetizing does not help much. Creating bookmark folders in Netscape makes it easy to group bookmarks by subject. However, when you do this, you may find that your subject headings are arbitrary and lack order. Try using the Dewey Decimal system that libraries use! Here are some useful Dewey names for folders. The list is not complete, but you can add to it from the Dewey Decimal summaries.

• Searching - keep this folder on top and use it to store the bookmarks for search engines
• 005/Computer Software - use this for sites that have downloadable software
• 020/Library
• 050/Serials
• 070/News
• 150/Psychology
• 320/Government
• 330/Economics
• 340/Law
• 370/Education
• 380/Commerce - use this for retail businesses on the WEB
• 400/Language
• 550/Earth Sciences - weather sites can go here
• 610/Medicine
• 630/Agriculture - gardening sites can go here
• 640/Home Economics - use this for recipes sites
• 750/Painting
• 780/Music
• 790/Recreation
• 800/Literature
• 910/Geography & Travel
• 920/Biography & Genealogy
• 970/History of North America
• (whenever you add a new bookmark, it goes to the end of the list until you click and drag it to a folder)

To practice creating folders, print out the following directions (if you don't know how to print see this tutorial's section on Hard Copies), and follow the directions. If you don't see what is described, you have a different version of Netscape. Use your Netscape's Help menu item to find out how to work with bookmarks in your version of Netscape.

To create a folder:

• Click on the menu item Bookmarks/Go To Bookmarks
• Place the cursor above where you want the folder name to appear in the list of bookmarks.
• Click on the menu for Item/Insert Folder.
• You will get a dialog box where you can type in the name of the folder.
• Once you have a folder created, it is merely a matter of clicking and dragging a bookmark into that folder.
  

To change the name of a folder you have already created:

• From within Bookmarks, click on the menu for Item/Properties
• Then make your changes in the dialog box.

Folders can either be collapsed (the contents don't show) or open (the individual bookmarks all show). Double clicking on a folder collapses the folder if it is open, or opens the folder if it is collapsed. The double click acts like a toggle switch, alternating between the two choices. I tend to keep my folders collapsed so that I can quickly go to the subject that I want and open only that folder.

Last revised February 1998