Hello! I created this web page to help people put up their own web pages, starting with the basics and moving right along. My name is Eric Rabkin. (You can click on my name to go to my home page.) I am a professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Like all web pages, this one was created as a Plain Text (also known as ASCII) file incorporating HTML tags. HTML (for HyperText Markup Language) is a set of mark-up tags, written inside chevrons in plain text files, that web browsers like Netscape Navigator read to display formatted web pages like this one. Virtually every word processor can save its documents in Plain Text (or ASCII) format and thus can produce the source files for web pages. HTML tags are very easy to use. TO SEE THE TAGS THAT MAKE THIS PAGE LOOKS AS IT DOES--AND HIDDEN COMMENTS EXPLAINING THOSE TAGS--I ENCOURAGE YOU TO USE YOUR WEB BROWSER'S VIEW/SOURCE COMMAND and to compare the source with what you see on this page. Indeed, if you want to see what tags make any web page work as it does, always remember to View/Source. Once you see the source, it is easy to copy and modify it to produce the effect you want in a page of your own. Another easy way to incorporate HTML tags in a document is to use an HTML Editor. The ones I currently favor are PageSpinner for the Macintosh and HTMLed32 for Windows 95. You can find many free-standing HTML editors at http://www.shareware.com and you can try them out for free by downloading them directly from the web. Also, many word processors have add-on or built-in facilities that can take ordinary word processor documents and automatically save many of their features (like italics and tables) with HTML tags. One such add-on is Internet Assistant for Word (for Mac or Windows), available free from Microsoft. To learn how to put your home page on a web server so that the world can view it, consult your system administrator or, if you are part of the University of Michigan community, follow our how-to-homepage instructions. Anyone wanting to learn more advanced web creation and design techniques should follow the links in the Writing For the Web section of ESR's Bookmarks. HTML can be used to do many things, including the following:
Here's a sample table with a built-in link:
Head1
Head2
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Top
You can find many more sample tables, with their underlying code, at Netscape's Table site.
Click to go to the top of this document.
Eric S. Rabkin Department of English University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1045 Home: 313-994-3553 Office: 313-764-2553 Dept: 313-764-6330
683 words
I first fell in love with thunderstorms at my grandparents' summer home in the foothills lining the Hudson Valley. In those days before home air conditioning, men who could removed their families from New York's hot asphalt summers, then drove alone back to The City on humid Sunday nights or chill Monday predawns to work through long sweltering days until they returned late Friday to what was always the most tired and joyful dinner of the week for the women and children who remained "in the mountains."
My grandparents' home was in a loose community of such refuges, all the men gone all week, all the women and children alone and privileged, although, since few women then drove cars, we were also, in a sense, cut off. I often felt a delicious ambivalence there, a vertiginous sense of abandonment mixed with the ease of Eden.
My mother's parents, my grandfather, really, had bought this refuge, I think, instead of the dacha he had never had in the Russia he fled as a very young man.
The house, with its projecting eaves, sat back from a dirt road, surrounded on three sides by dense woods, its picture window looking across the road and up the sweep of what to me was a wooded mountain.
Sitting alone under those deep eaves, on suddenly chill late afternoons when the sky turned slate, I watched thunderstorms crest the mountain. First I heard distant rumbles, a living legend, the ghosts of Hendrik Hudson's men bowling across the sky. Leaves on the trees by our empty driveway turned themselves in frantic unison, flickering from dark green to near silver as the air grew ready, full, explosive. High on the mountaintop, as the sky above it blackened, numberless treetops whipped in a wind that didn't yet touch me. Then the first shattering crack of lightning and thunder burst over the nearby mountain, frightening me further under the temporary safety of those eaves until the cold, fat drops multiplied into a hard rain that drove me inside to watch from behind the window as the fury from the skies careened above and tore into our pocket of finally welcome warmth.
Summer is the season of thunderstorms and ease.
This Sunday I visited a friend who has a deep porch sheltered by an angle of his house. When I heard, from inside his air conditioned living room, a distant rumble, I asked to sit outside, and so we did.
This was a storm worth watching. At times it threw down torrents so fierce that we could barely discern the windows of the houses across his suburban street. Thunder roared, trees whipped wildly, and lightning ripped the sky. After a spectacular display, the storm seemed to slacken, but then resumed gloriously.
Suddenly, across the way, a garage door rose, disclosing cars in both bays. By the garage light, we saw a squat, agile man shuck himself into a raincoat, enter one car, and back it twenty feet out into the relentless rain.
Then the man came out of the car into the rain. Amidst the howling storm, he hunched methodically back and forth across his driveway, removing fallen twigs and branches.
As we sat watching in the chill wind, lightning everywhere, he finished his work and retreated through the garage into the house leaving the big door open. The rain continued.
Five minutes later, a car came down the road, turned into the driveway, and drove out of the storm into the garage.
"That's his son in the car," my friend noted. But once in the garage, the young man came around his car, opened the other door, leaned over, and retrieved a baby in his arms. The grandfather bustled into the garage to embrace them both and then the door shut automatically behind them all.
Thinking of that grandfather easing the way for his children in the storm, my friend said what I felt, too: "That was beautiful." Then he said, "But they probably will never know what he did."
I only want to say that somehow, sooner or later, children know.
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The coding for this particular imagemap, I'll admit, is not quite as straightforward as that used for earlier features on this page, in part because server-side imagemaps require three things: a specially prepared graphic, a map file for that graphic, and linking to a cgi, a Common Gateway Interface that takes the choice the user indicates by clicking on the graphic and sends it to a server that then connects the user with another web location. You may want to learn more about html and cgi's in general, but you can also easily learn just how to make a server-side imagemap, and produce and use the necessary map file, by accessing U-M's imagemap advice. To use this advice, you will probably want to use an imagemap editor such as MacMapMaker on a Macintosh or Map This on a Windows machine. The MacMapMaker site has links to all necessary imagemap instructions, too, except those for your putting the graphic and map files on your local server so that they access the cgi, and Map This has on-line help with the same limitations. To get those uploading instructions, if you're not at U-M, you may need to contact your Webmaster. Of course, right now you can use VIEW/SOURCE to see the code for making this imagemap work.
In addition to server-side imagemaps, one can use client-side imagemaps that include the mapping instructions right in the same html file that calls up the image that is mapped. This saves you from having to create, upload, and activate a separate map file. Many html editors, such as Claris Home Page, produce client-side imagemaps quite straightforwardly; however, only modern browsers support client-side maps. If you have an imagemap cgi available on your server and are in doubt about the capabilities of your users' browsers, use server-side imagemapping. If you have no cgi available or presume your users have modern browsers or you don't want to take the extra trouble of creating a seperate map file, use client-side imagemapping. To the user, a client-side imagemap looks the same as a server-side imagemap. However, I include a client-side imagemap here so you can see the code behind it.
If you want to learn more about how U-M users can put working forms on their web pages, check out the information on the cgi's for "htmail," "swishgate," and "counter" provided as part of the University of Michigan Web Services.