I recently distributed a FAQ I found on the Internet on how to use the World
Wide Web if you only have e-mail. I was told that it was somewhat cryptic, so
I’m going to attempt to give my own version here, specific to the Unicycling
Home Page. Feel free to send comments.
Unicycling Home Page Access via E-mail
If you have a World Wide Web(WWW) browser such as Mosaic or Lynx you will want
to use it to access the home page. If not, though, you can still get to it; the
access will just be a bit slower. You can get everything that is in it: text,
pictures, and animation.
What is the WWW?
The WWW is away of linking together information spanning the Internet. People
will put together documents called “pages” that can reference their or other
people’s pages, graphics, animations, or sounds. When someone uses one of these
pages, they will see text, perhaps accompanied by pictures. Some of the text
will be highlighted. The user can move the cursor to the highlighted text and
hit Enter or click the mouse. They will then see whatever the page author wishes
to connect to the highlighted words.
What is a URL?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator (I think). It is an address for anything
you can reference on the WWW. An example is
<a href="http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/">http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/</a>
http means that this is a web page, nimitz.mcs.kent.edu is the Internet node,
and ~bkonarsk/ is sufficient to find the page on the machine. Other URL’s may
start with ftp or other things.
E-Mail version of the Web
The e-mail version of the WWW is more like a term paper with footnotes. Items
with references elsewhere have a number by them, and you can look up the numbers
at the end of the document to find the URL. The advantage over a research paper
is that all you have to do is get the URL; you don’t have to figure out if you
have the book or magazine.
How to do something useful on the WWW with e-mail
If all this discussion seems obscure, try getting the unicycle home page. To do
this, send e-mail to
listproc@www0.cern.ch
and put
www http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/
in the body of the message. Soon you will get back a copy of the home page. Here
is an exerpt:
…
How to ride a unicycle[5] Here you can read several different ways to learn to
ride the unicycle.
Fun things to try with your unicycle[6] Now that you have learned to ride,
here are some more things to do.
Games to play on the unicycle[7] Learn about unicycle hockey and find out how
to compete in unicycle meets.
Roster of unicyclists[8] Find other unicyclists in your area. Includes e-mail
addresses and home pages when available.
…
[5] http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/howtoride.html
[6] http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/unifun.html
[7] http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/games.html
[8] http://nimitz.mcs.kent.edu/~bkonarsk/roster.html
…
If you want to look at the roster of unicyclists, then look up [8] in the
list at the end of the document and use the URL to request the list. You can
keep doing this until you have had enough links. If you get a binary file,
like a GIF, the file will be uuencoded, so you will need a uudecode program
to work with it.
There are some fine points to all of this, like working with URL’s that start
with “ftp:” and end in “.html”, but I’ll assume that by the time you worry about
that you are ready for more comprehensive documentation. You can then check the
“How to use WWW via e-mail and TELNET” document which I mailed out earlier to
the unicycling list, or you can get it by sending the following message to
listproc@www0.cern.ch