XplanaZine

There is currently a huge gap between the emerging technologies and standards on which digital archives are being built, and the resources that most faculty members have at their disposal. I’m not sure how we can close that gap, but there is a probably a lot we can do to narrow it! The other day, I showed an example of a static website, published with bare-bones software and web-hosting - which is pretty much what most faculty members have access to. What I’d like to talk about for the next couple of days are the free tools that faculty members, and students too, can use in developing online content. The perception - rightly or wrongly - is that the Internet is free. So it makes sense that we should try to find some free tools for people to use in developing the content that they are going to giving away for free over the web.
So, you want to make webpages for free? Or - just as important - you want to help your students make webpages for free? There are two options: blogging, and creating static webpages that can be published on a web account provided by your school. For static webpages, I think that Mozilla’s Composer - also available as part of the Netscape Communicator package - is an absolutely great option! I first learned how to publish webpages using Composer and have shown literally hundreds of people how to make use of this delightful tool. And it’s gotten better and better in its most recent iterations. For those of you who have not looked at Composer since the iterations in Netscape 4 - you will be favorably impressed. But if you still attached to the old Netcape 4 version of Composer, you can install Mozilla, run the “Classic Theme” and you will see the new version of Composer with many nifty features… looking just like your old Netscape 4.

But I’ve applied the “Skypilot2” theme to my Mozilla browser, so my nifty new Composer looks like this:

Here is an overview of the features.
1. FREE AND EASY TO INSTALL. Composer is a WYSIWYG HTML editor that is included in Mozilla’s browser package, and as part of Netscape Communicator. Both Mozilla and Communicator are freely available and easy to download and install.
2. BUILT IN FTP UTILITY. This allows people to use Composer to both edit their webpages and upload them to their webspace without having to install a separate FTP utility. You can create multiple FTP profiles inside Composer.
3. EASY IMAGE MANIPULATION. Composer makes it easy to insert and publish images with your page, and it does the best job of nagging people about alt-text tags that I have ever seen! (and good for Composer: it’s not that people don’t want to add alt-text tags to their images, they just forget) (well, I tend to forget…)

4. EASY LINK MANAGEMENT. Composer does a great job of helping people to create relative links, links to internal targets, and links to external webpages. It also boasts a very nice “advanced” link interface that allows you to work with link attributes, inline styles and java script events.

5. CLEAN FONT MANAGEMENT. The Font options are straightforward (Helvetica, Times, Courier) and users are encouraged to use proportional font sizing (medium, large, x-large, small, x-small, etc.).
6. GOOD EDITING. This version of Composer has a nice find-and-replace interface, with great support for Unicode and extended character sets (all my Polish diacritics are here!). The Netscape version of Composer comes with a Spellchecker, which seems to not be available in Mozilla (a curious difference).
I always enjoy showing people how to use Composer - it gives you a great sense of a what a web page is all about. It is not a web site manager by any means, and I always tell people who are planning to put up more than ten webpages or so should invest in Dreamweaver (educational discount price is still jut $99), since it will save them time in the end. But for people just getting started, they need to understand what a web page is before they start worrying about a site - and I still think that on the scale of a single page, Composer is the best tool out there. So if you just want your students to publish their work to share with the rest of the class on the Internet, Composer is a wonderful solution. I have my students build their webpages using Composer, and all kinds of great things can happen.
And great things are happening with Composer itself - Daniel Glazman has just released the latest version of Composer with forms support - wow! He is apparently planning to build a free-standing version of Composer, with lots more tools for incorporating style sheets into Composer webpages. All hail to Daniel Glazman - Composer has been and continues to be one of the best ways to start publishing on the Internet!