On September 28th 1995, Dr Adrian Vanzyl of the Unit of Medical Informatics gave a presentation on publishing information on the WWW. He began the talk by asking what he considered to be fundamental questions prior to the establishment of a collection of WWW documents:
"Who do you want to reach with this information?"
"What do you want to publish?"
He said that once the effort has been made to publish information on the Web, it should be promoted and advertised at every opportunity. One of the best ways to do this is to put your WWW address (URL) on anything you send out - letterheads, business cards, memos, etc. Web pages can also be registered with WWW Search services, such as Yahoo, which provides subject based guides to Internet resources. The latter is a very effective way of providing access to your Web pages.
He briefly talked about various tools which can assist in the creation or authoring of Web pages. In particular, he mentioned HotDog, which is better than Internet Assistant, conversion tools such as RTFtoHTM converters (which can be used for existing documents), Framemaker, HotMetal and Netscape v.2.0.
From there, Adrian went on to talk about particular aspects of Web pages, and good design, such as Forms, Security issues, and multimedia elements. For the latter, he recommended using .au file formats for audio files, and .mpeg for video input. This led to a brief discussion on Java and VRML.
On the subject of images, Adrian talked about creating transparent backgrounds and interlaced images, and tools which can be used to create these. He also talked about creating thumbnail images, and HTML which lets you identify the size of the image so that text loads first, followed by the image itself. Alignment of images was also touched on, and he discussed the merits of various software such as Imagemap and Mapedit which can be used in the creation of clickable image maps for Web pages. For ordinary images, Adrian recommended Lview Pro or Photoshop Lite or Premier Lite.
Adrian talked to some handouts that were given to attendees, which were basically copies of a training course outline that Adrian delivered at Rockefeller University in the US last year. This information can be found online at the location http://www.monash.edu.au/informatics/training/
For further information about publishing on the WWW, either access
the location listed above, or have a look at the guidelines for Monash WWW & Multimedia developers
Summaries of past presentations
Last updated: 15th January 1996
Enquiries: Deidre.Schutz@lib.monash.edu.au
Copyright © Monash University 1994