LIS650lecture 0 Introductory lecture Thomas Krichel 2005-09-11.

LIS650 lecture 0

Introductory lecture

Thomas Krichel

2005-09-11

today• Today's contents

– Administrative introduction to the course– Substantive introduction to the course– Talk about you!– Introduction to the web– Introduction to XML– Introduction to character sets– A few words about images

• Fairly general, abstract and tough lecture. Can lead to serious angst.

course resources• Course home page is at

http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/lis650p05a

• The class mailing list https://lists.liu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cwp-lis650-krichel

• Me. Send me email. Unless you request privacy,I answer to the class mailing list. I come here on several days to council students. I announce all times on the mailing list.

general assessment

• First quiz next lecture.• If you miss a lecture, let me know in advance. • In addition to the quizzes, we have

– the web site plan (to be handed in next week)– the web site assessment (to be handed in later) – the final web site (to be handed in at the end)

• Final grade is calculated by computer. Quizzes go through a complicated discounting scheme. It disregards the worst quiz performance.

web site assessment

• Look at the web site of a university Library and Information Science department.

• A list is at http://informationr.net/wl/• Write a text not describing, but commenting on

the web site. • State the site URL, I will look at it.• Try to keep you text short please, no more than 2

pages.• Feel free to others for opinions.

the final web site• Contents should be equivalent to a student essay.• Good contents and good architecture are

important to a straight A.• It should be a contribution to knowledge on a

topic.• Personal sites are not allowed. • Deadline to finish web site: one week after the

end of the last lecture. • You will not be able to change your web site

between the deadline and the time that the grade is issued.

course history

• Course was first run as an institute 2002-05-13 to 2002-05-17

• Title was “Webmastering I: the static web site”.• To the curriculum committee, this title did not

sound academic enough. • In 2003 “Web Site Architecture and Design”

(WebSAD) became the the full title.• In 2005 “Passive Web Site Architecture and

Design” became the title.• WebSAD is what we basically learn.

teaching WeSAD

• WeSAD combines many aspects:– Authoring pages– Work on the organization of data to fit onto pages– Set display style of different pages– Define look and feel of the site– Organize the contribution of data– Maintain a technical web installation

• Some of them can be learned in a course, but others can not.

• Emphasis has to be on learnable elements.

teaching philosophy

• Point and click on a computer software is not enough.

• Explain underlying principles.• Promote standards

– XHTML 1.0 strict– CSS level 2.1

• Avoid proprietary software.• Provide a reasonable rigorous introduction to

digital information.

LIS650 contents

• Deals with the maintenance of a passive web site. Such a web site remains the same whatever the user does with it. There is no customization for different users or times.

• Topics include– (x)html– css– site usability and information architecture, as far as

relevant for passive web sites– http, uri, web server

things this course does not do

• Forms: allow you to design forms that users fill in. But you do not have the programming skills to do something with the form.

• Frames: allow you to put several documents into one physical document. Most experts advise against them.

• We do not cover image maps.• We don’t do some advanced CSS properties.• Some exotic features of HTML are overlooked.

Other course: LIS651• Deals with building active web sites.

– Users fill in a form– Users submit the form– Web server return a page that is specific to the

request of the user.

• Teaches a language called PHP, that is widely used to generate such web sites.– Gets you introduced to computer programming– Gets you to train analytical thinking.

• Teaches relational database to store and retrieve information.– Gets you to think about the structure of information.

world wide web The World Wide Web (Web) is a network of

information resources. The Web relies on four standards to make these resources readily available to the widest possible audience:– A uniform naming scheme for locating resources on

the Web (i.e. URIs). – Protocols, for access to named resources over the

Internet (e.g., http). – Hypertext, for easy navigation among resources (e.g.,

HTML).– Vocabularies for types of objects on the Web (i.e.

MIME types)

URI introduction

• Every resource available on the Web -- HTML document, image, video clip, program, etc. -- has an address that may be encoded by a Uniform Resource Identifier, or “URI”.

• URIs typically consist of three pieces:– The name of the mechanism used

• to access the resource• or the otherwise “resolve” it

– The name of the machine hosting the resource. – The name of the resource itself, given as a path.

example URI

• http://openlib.org/home/krichel

This URI may be read as follows: There is a document available via the HTTP protocol, residing on the Internet host openlib.org, accessible via the path "/home/krichel".

• mailto:[email protected]

This URI may be read as follows: There is email user krichel in a domain openlib.org to whom email may be sent.

Internet application protocols

• On the Internet machines use different application level protocols to do things

• Common protocols include– http -- dns -- telnet– smtp -- ssh -- ftp

• All of the ones cited are client/server protocols– client issues a request– server gives a response

the http protocol• http is a widely used application level protocol on

the web.• http is stateless. Each transaction is self-

contained. Each transaction has no relationship to the previous one.

• http has a limited vocabulary of requests and responses. It is no good, say, to operate a machine remotely.

• http is insecure. The contents of http transactions (requests/responses) can be observed.

• We can therefore not use it to build web pages.

communication with wotan• The protocol that we use for communicating with

the server is the secure shell, short ssh. It is based public-key cryptography.

• There are two PC programs commonly used as ssh clients– putty for issuing commands – winscp for file transfer.

• winscp is the one we will use. In offers a range of other facilities besides file transfer.

• Mac users should investigate a software called fugu: http://eq.rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

important rule

• When you compose web pages, you use winscp.• When you look at your own web pages, you use a

common web user agent.• Never use winscp to look at your own web pages.

You will not rot in hell, but you will be confused.

user name & password

• You can choose your user name as a short form of your own name.

• It should be all lowercases and can not have spaces.

• Your final project pages can be placed in a subdirectory, say at

http://wotan.liu.edu/~user/project, where user is your user name.

• We will worry about that later.

registration time

• As part of the course, you are being provided with web space on the server wotan.liu.edu, at the URL

http://wotan.liu.edu/~user

where user is a user name that you will chose now.

• You may wish to make the user name some short form of your name. Remember you will be able to have that site for many years to come.

free software• I maintain wotan.liu.edu server but you can build

your own server if– you have Internet access– you have an old PC to spare

• All the server software, as well as putty and winscp are free, open-source. It is one of my fundamental beliefs that free information should run on free software.

installing winscp

• http://winscp.net/eng/download.php has – “installation package”. for use if you have administrator

rights on the machine where you are installing to – “application”. for use otherwise, i.e. to just download

and run the application

• At installation time, when/if asked about the default interface, I suggest you use “Windows explorer style”, rather than the default “Norton commander style” . You can change that later, so no panic.

other stuff: installing “user agents”

• Download and install a recent version of at least two browsers. I suggest– Mozilla Firefox at

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/– Opera at http://www.opera.com

open a wotan session with winscp• If you see a list of session, click on “new

session”.– The host name is “wotan.liu.edu”.– Give your user name.– Click on “save”, this will save the session, after “ok”.

• You will be lead to the list of saved sessions, double-click to open a session.

• At first connection you will see a warning you can ignore.

• You can save the password as part of the session. It is risky to do that in a public classroom. You may want to do it at home.

initial remote files on wotan• A set of files starting with a dot.

– These are places where Linux Masters exert their black magic.

– Leave them alone.

• A directory called public_html– This is the place where web masters exert their magic.

You can go into that directory to see the files that you have on your web site at the moment.

– There should be two file• validated.html• main.css

– Do NOT double-click any file!

HTML and XHTML

• HTML is the hypertext markup language• HTML is a markup language that is widely used

on the Web.• The latest, and probably last version of HTML is

at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/• The W3C, the standard making body for the

Web, have issued XHTML, a replacement of HTML that is compatible with XML.

• We will work with XHTML. But we will call it HTML by abuse of language.

SGML HTML XML

• You will probably have come across these terms. • SGML was developed first. HTML and XML are

developed from SGML in different ways.– HTML is an SGML DTD.– XML is an SGML application.

• One common thing here is the ML. It stands for Markup Language.

• Markup is everything in a document that is not content.

SGML• Standard Generalized Markup Language• Descriptive approach with three separate layers

– structure: types of information in document– content: the information itself– style: defines how to typeset the document

• Developed for the publishing industry by a group of consultants.

• So complicated that no software implements it fully.

• But an important idea that remains of it is the document type definition.

Document Type Definition (DTD)

• The DTD is a non-SGML language that describes SGML document types

• Describes information the document handles, e.g.– title– chapter

• Relationships between fields e.g.– a chapter contains sections– a title comes at the top of the document

XML• Since SGML is so complicated, it is not good for

use on the Web.• So the W3C has issued XML, the eXtensible

Markup Language.• Every XML document is SGML, but not the

opposite.• Thus XML is like SGML but with many features

removed. • XML defines the syntax that we will use to write

HTML. We have to study that syntax in some detail, now.

nodes

• "node" is a word used to characterize everything that can be put in the XML document.

• We will study the following types on nodes– character data– elements– attributes– comments– DTD declarations

• There are other types of nodes that we don't need to learn about here.

node type: character data

• Character data is simply a sequence of characters.

• Examples– "abec"

– "8 [[ + 2 ¼"

• At the end of the lecture, we will discuss character data again.

note type: XML elements• XML is based on elements. There are basically

three ways of writing an element.• The first way is write <element/>.• Here element is the name of the element.• Such an element is called an empty element. • Example:

<bang/>

• This is an empty element, the name of which is “bang”.

non-empty elements• If name is the name of the element, you can give

an element contents contents by writing <name>contents</name>.

• contents is often simple character data.• Here <name> is called a start tag. </name> is

called the end tag. Both tags surround the contents of the element.

• Remember the previous slide? Then note that <name/> is just a shortcut for <name></name>.

• Elements within other elements are called child elements.

element & character data examples • <greeting>bonjour</greeting>• <greeting>здравствуйте</greeting>• <sentence>She says <greeting>hello</greeting>

to you.</sentence>• <menu><choice>Bibbelsches Bohnesupp mit

Quetschekuche</choice> or <choice> Dibbellabbes mit Abbeltratsch</choice></menu>

• <examples> <example>I koh Glos essa, und es duard ma ned wei.</example><example>Ja mogu esti staklo, i ne boli me. </example> <example>Kristala jan dezaket, ez det minik ematen.</example></examples>

note type: attributes

• Elements can have attributes. Here is an element with two attributes

• <name attribute_name_one="value_one" attribute_name_two="value_two"/>

• Here attribute_name_one and attribute_name_two are attribute names and value_one and value_two are attribute values. The element itself is empty.

• Example: <greeting language="french">bonjour</greeting>

more on attributes

• Attribute names are separated from their values by the = sign.

• There can be no two attributes to the same element with the same names. So you can not have something like <trafficlight color="red" color="green"/>

more on attributes

• Attribute values are simple strings. You can not have an element inside an attribute value. Thus you can not write, for example <meal type="<cookie/>">chocolate</meal>

• Attribute values can be enclosed in single or double quotes. It does not matter. Double quotes are more common, so I suggest you use those.

more examples

<poet born="1799" died="1837">

<name lang="ru">Александер Сергеевич Пушкин</name>

<name lang="en">Alexander S. Pushkin</name>

<name lang="fr">Alexandre Pouchkine</name>

</poet>

node type: comments

• In an XML document, you can make comments about your code. These are notes to yourself.

• Comments start with <!--• Comments end with -->• Example: <!-- this is a comment --> • Comments can not be nested.• Can appear anywhere in the document.• They can enclose elements.

node type: DTD declaration

• XML documents, like any SGML documents, accept document type declarations.

• A document type declaration tells us something about the vocabulary of elements and attributes used in the document.

• It should appear before the root element, after the XML declaration, if you have one.

• It takes the form <!DOCTYPE mumbojumbo >• We will come back to the document type

declaration later.

XML document

• An XML document is a piece of data that is written in XML.

• But sometimes the author of a document makes a mistake, and, in fact the XML is wrong in some ways.

• If there is no mistake, the document is called well-formed.

• If a document is not well-formed, it really is not an XML document.

some rules for well-formedness • All elements must be properly nested. You can

only close the outer element after all inner elements are closed. Examples– <a><b></a></b> not well-formed– <a><b></b></a> well formed

• An attribute must have a value. Thus you can not write <result abstract>... </result>. The value may be empty like in <result abstract=''>...</result> or <result abstract="">... </result>.

more rules for well-formedness • There must be one single element in the document

that all other elements are children of.• It is called the root element.• All other elements are called children of the root.• Whitespace that surrounds the root element is

ignored.• The root element may be preceded by a prologue.

This is anything before the root element.• The DTD declaration can only appear in the

prologue.

XML example file: validated.html

• This is an XML file.• Please look at it to find all the node types.• Examine how the well-formedness constraints are

implemented. • Make sure you understand every aspect of its

syntax.

copying validated.html• validated.html is your model web page. • To create a new web page, right click (remember

never double-click) on validated.html, and choose "duplicate" from the menu. Do not choose "copy".

• You will be asked to supply a name for the file. Erase any contents in the dialog box, and then enter the file name you want to create (say test.html). Always have that file name end with ".html".

• You may be asked to give your password again.• Did I say you should not double-click in winscp?

test.html

• In your test.html file, look for the

<p id="validator">• Right before that string, insert

<div>Hello, world!</div>• Save you file by write • Do not double click test.html !• Open a web user agent, point it to the URL

http://wotan.liu.edu/~user/test.html where user is your user name.

public_html• Imagine you are user user and you have a file

file in public_html.• The web server will map requests to

http://wotan.liu.edu/~user/file to show the file /home/user/public_html/file.

• Here user stands for your user name, and file is the file name, and "/" is the directory separator.

• If file ends with ".html" or ".htm" the web browser will be told that the file is a HTML file. It will be rendered accordingly by the browser.

• This is done using the MIME type text/html.

index.html• The web server on wotan will map requests to

http://wotan.liu.edu/~user/ to show the file /home/user/public_html/index.html

• If this file is not there, the server prepares a HTML document from the list of files that it finds in the directory. Then it sends it to the user agent.

• Once you have a file index.html, the web user can no longer see the individual files in your directory.

Characters: concept

• A character set combine two things– Character repertoire: a set of characters e.g. "A", "ض"

"‼", "₣"– Character code positions: defines a number for each

character in the repertoire.

• Character encoding is a way to encode the code positions in bytes.

• To correctly display a document, the user agent needs to know both!

playing safe with characters

• Only use the characters on the US keyboard, don't insert symbols.

• Save as ASCII or UTF-8. All ASCII files are also UTF-8 files.

• Never save as "Unicode" within MS Notepad.• If you encounter a character that is not on your

keyboard, use an SGML entity.• The SGML entity is the last special SGML thing

that we have to study.

SGML entities

• SGML entities are something like a way to represent non-ASCII characters when only ASCII input is possible.

• Codes can can be &code;– Example: "&eacute;" Inserts an "é".– This is called a character entity– Codes are often abbreviation of the character names

• Codes can be in hex number form– Example: &#38; to insert an ampersand– This is called a numeric entity

XHTML entities• They are officially defined in three files that are

maintained by the W3C– http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent– http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent– http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-symbol.ent

• A sample line is • <!ENTITY ccedil "&#231;"> <!-- latin small letter c

with cedilla, U+00E7 ISOlat1 -->– <!ENTITY is DTD speak for defining an entity.– It is followed by the character form and the numeric

form of the entity– The rest of the line is a comment, of course

important entities used in XML• There are three that you need to know and use.

– &lt; stands for <– &gt; stands for > – &amp; stands for &– &quot; stands for "– &nbsp; makes a non-breakable space

• Every time you want to insert <, > or & in the documents, you have to use the entities instead.

• Examples:– krichel&#64;openlib.org– Je suis Fran&ccedil;ais.– Marks &amp; Spencers– 3 &lt; 4

other example

• Look at http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/examp les/xml/gradesheet.xml.

• First consider the rendered version as it appears in the browser. It illustrates the type of XML data file that Thomas uses to compose his grades and feeds them into the computer. It is well-formed XML.

• Second, consider the source code of the web page. Why are there all these &lt; and &gt; ?

special topic: images

• The appeal of the web to the masses has a lot to do with its capability to transport image.

• Image formats are independent of the web, but there are two classic format that are widely supported by user agents.– GIF– JPEG– PNG

• The resolution of the image is an important factor.

resolution

• On a pixel image the term resolution is often used to say how many pixels are there horizontally and vertically.

• The larger the number of pixels the wider it will appear on the screen.

• But you will never know how large it is on the screen because that depends on how many pixels your user's screen draws per inch of display.

• The web is a bad place for a control freaks.

GIF

• stands for graphics interchange format. • developed by CompuServe.• unresolved copyright issues make the format

abhorred by the free software community.• 250 colors maximum• uses a loss-less compression technique

GIF has three tricks• interlacing:

– when downloading the file, the browser can show every forth row first

– user gets in an idea of the picture before it is sharp

• transparency– some GIFs are transparent, so you can see them on

top of already exist– technically, the GIF has one color as the background

color, and pixels of that color are ignored by the user agent

• animation– some GIFs are in fact sequences of GIFs that can be

rendered one after the other.

JPEG

• The Joint Photographic Experts Group is a standard-making body for images

• They can support thousands of colors.• The compression is lossy, i.e. the JPEG file will

look like the original image, but not be the same.• The compression does not work well with

drawings. • There are no copyright and patent problems with

JPEG

Homework

• Look at course home page.• Install winscp and browsers at home.• Prepare a one-page max web site plan. Bring a

printed copy with you next week.• Prepare for quiz at the beginning of next lecture.

web site plan

• Who commissioned the web site?• Whom is the site for?• What pages will be on the site?

– Name each page.

– Establish hierarchy between pages.

• Any special technical challenges?

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Please shutdown the computers when

you are done.

Thank you for your attention!