WWW Pages and Production

[Eric Ray <ejray -at- OKWAY -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU>]

     Kathy and all,
     As others have said, creating documents for the Web is
     exciting and challenging. I've done a few Web pages
     (mostly by the seat of my pants rather than carefully
     planned) and picked up a few useful tips.

     First, make your computer do the conversion work for
     you. If you develop or convert on a Windows platform, I
     recommend a Word for Windows add-in template called
     cu_html. It allows you to do wholesale conversions of
     existing documents based on the styles in use. In
     conjunction with the AutoFormat feature in Word 6, you
     can produce an acceptable conversion of a flat ASCII
     file in no time.

     I then use a stand-alone program called HTML Assistant
     for fine-tuning the formatting and adding extra bells
     and whistles. This program has a file size limit of
     32K, which is a feature, not a bug (well, maybe it's a
     bug). If you exceed that size limit, you need to
     carefully consider the usability of your final
     document. A document longer than that will take "prit
     near forever," as Jack's Uncle Ralph would say, to
     load.
     Some of our CIS Newsletters exceed that, but I
     rationalized the time savings on my part justified the
     added time on the user's part for a primarily one-time
     use document. I don't do that for reference
     information.

     Second, putting information out just in ASCII format or
     putting it out in ASCII, then converting to HTML as
     time permits is doing it the hard way. Making decent
     ASCII pages is a laborious process, which you can
     completely circumvent by using LYNX. LYNX has a command
     line switch which allows you to dump a file to ASCII
     with all the formatting intact, so you have a very
     nicely formatted (all things considered) ASCII file.
     The command is:
     lynx -dump http://your.new.url/file.html > file.txt
     The new file.txt file is ready to go into gopher--you
     may want to remove some of the _emphasis_ but that
     isn't completely necessary.

     If you have any questions about the process we use,
     please let me know. If you want to check out what we've
     put out there so far, our Web server is at
     http://www.okstate.edu/ and our gopher is at
     gopher.okstate.edu. The utilities I mentioned are all
     under our gopher, in Computing Information, Selected
     Software, and CWIS Tools. Sorry about the lack of
     pretty formatting and names--this part is purely
     functional right now. The files are self-extracting
     .zip files. If you are looking for pointers to other
     Web construction information, check out
     http://www.okstate.edu/osumeta/html and look at the
     bottom of the page.

     Finally, shameless plug: a few others on this list and
     I proposed a panel for the STC Conference in Washington
     about using the Web as a document delivery vehicle. If
     it is accepted, it should address a number of these
     concerns.

     Eric
     ejray -at- okway -dot- okstate -dot- edu