Web Publishing FAQ

See World Wide Web FAQ, a FAQ page maintained by Thomas Boutell and Boutell.Com, Inc. This is page provides an overview of the Web and addresses questions regarding content, languages, legal matters, browsers, servers, authoring and scripting, and other Web resources.

A very good explanation of these file formats and others are explained at the following web site: http://www.lcsc.edu/biology/REFS/download.file.formats.txt

Colors are given in RGB as hexadecimal numbers (e.g. "#C0FFC0") or as one of 16 widely understood color names: aqua, black, blue, gray, fuchsia, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white (white), yellow. These colors were originally picked as being the standard 16 colors supported with the Windows VGA palette.

A Cookie is a little nugget of data that is sent to your browser from a World Wide Web Server. This data is accepted by your browser, checked for length, expiration date, path and domain then saved. This piece of data can be no more than 4000 bytes (characters) long and is never "executed" as code. It can't contain programs or viruses. A cookie can contain whatever data you want. You could create a unique user ID, save it as a cookie and then the browser would never have to enter it again. Shopping carts can be created that will allow the browser to quit and 6 months later come back and still have the same products in their cart.

When a person clicks a link to a page the browser checks the URL of the link against it's cookie database, if it has a cookie that matches the domain and path of the link it will send the cookie to the server along with the request for the page.

It is important to note that when a server sets a cookie the browser will not give up it's cookie data to any other server.

Contact John Sullivan at 828-8680 or e-mail him at jsulliva@vcu.edu

If you want to know if a particular page uses cookies and what it is doing, then enter the following in the address field.

javascript:alert("Cookie:"+document.cookie)

Insert the following javascript diectly following the </form> tag.

<script language="JavaScript">
   <!--
      document.YourFormName.YourInputName.focus();
   // -->
</script>

ReadPlease (freeware), Jaws (by Freedom Scientific), and Home Page Reader (by IBM) are all good screen reader programs.

Please visit our page describing how to upload files to the different VCU Servers.

Instead of including userID@vcu.edu, which robot will easily be able to find, use the &#64; code instead of @. These are identical when read by the browser and will prevent spam robot from picking up your e-mail. Here is an example of what the mailto link would look like:

<A HREF="mailto:userID&#64;vcu.edu">Contact Us</A>

The weather was added to the VCU Homepage by using a CGI Script that reads the relevant information from the National Weather Service's Web Page and the writes that information to a text file every hour. The text file is inserted in the VCU Home Page as an include. The reason a text file is used is to prevent an error if the National Weather Service's Web Page is down.

To include the weather on your page insert the following code:

<!--#include file="http://www.vcu.edu/wss/weather.txt" -->

*Please Note* You must have a site on the www.vcu.edu domain for this to work. This code will not work on virtual hosts or if Server Side Includes are not available for your site. You must also use a .shtml extension on the page with the weather.

If you are not able to use includes, you can insert this code into your page to get the weather in a different format: (Customize)

<a href="http://www.weatherroom.com/forecast/Richmond.VA.html"> <img src="http://www.weatherroom.com/weather?forecast=hourly&hwvtc=black&hwvbg=white&pands=Richmond, VA&config=png&alt=hwicc" alt="Weather for Richmond.VA provided by weatherroom.com." border="0"></a><br>

*Please Note* This is just one of many weather tools that can be found on the web. You can search Google for additional weather formats.

You can delete all of your web pages using WS-FTP. This is the same program used to upload your files to your web site. Simply login to your account and select all of your folders and files and click the "Delete" button on the right side of the console. You do not want to delete folders that you did not create. These folders might include: "public_html", "_private", "_vti_bin", "_vti_cnf".

If you are using FrontPage to edit your web pages you do not need to use an FTP program to delete your files. This can be done through FrontPage. Select "View" -> "Folder List" from the menu. This shows a list of all of your folders on the left side of the screen. Then select the file you want to delete and hit the "delete" key on your keyboard. You can delete entire folder like this as well.

When you are ready to create you new page just upload the pages to your account. Make sure you have an index page (index.html).

The FTP program is available on the AT website. Instructions for logging into your account can be found on the Web Support Services site.