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A Netscape Tutorial
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Welcome to the Netscape tutorial. The purpose of this small tutorial is to acquaint you with some of the less well-known but nonetheless important features of Netscape -- not the corporation, but the web browser and associated suite of applications that usually go by that name. Specifically I am concerned with the most recent iteration of the product, now known as Netscape Communicator, Version 4.00 through 4.06, for either Windows, Macintosh, or Unix. I make no attempt to be comprehensive, either in breadth or depth, but rather to shed light on the extent and power of Netscape's set of features. I assume that you already know something about how to use Netscape, such as how to open it up and point to pages on the web by clicking on a page's links or perhaps by entering an address in the address bar. I don't assume much else. In order to acquaint you with Netscape's features, I take a visual approach to the application. Netscape, like many other desktop applications (such as WordPerfect or PowerPoint) is designed to expose its functionality to the user by means of its visual organization, so that the user need not spend a lot of time reading manuals or going over tutorials like this one. The most important means of conveying information in this way is with the menu bar and other toolbars. Except for a few rarely used and useless features (like being able to see Netscape's FishCam), all of the programs functionality is presented in the hierarchically organized set of menus and tools. Therefore, I will simply walk you through the terrain of the application and stop to point out some useful places to know. Typographic conventionsWords separated by an arrow stand for a sequence of selections; the sequence is prefixed by the name of the context, in caps (but see below). For example,
refers to selecting "File" from the menu bar, and then selecting "Print ...". If a menu option brings you to a little window (called a "dialog box"), then the sequence is represented thus:
The prefix to the second line is a literal transcription of whatever appears in the window title of the dialog box; window titles are not in caps unless the window title itself is. If there is no official word for an icon, I just use the icon instead of a word. If a word has parentheses around it, then it refers to a gloss for an icon that has no official title (that I could discover). When a value is assigned to a field in a dialog box, I use the equal sign and put quotes around the added value, like so:
If a value has angle brackets around it, then it stands for a non-literal value that needs to be interpolated. For example: A Dialog Box: Name = "<put your name here>" A few remarks about the word "Netscape"The word "Netscape" refers to a suite of applications. The three most important of these are Navigator (the web browser), Messenger (the mail and news reader), and Composer (the html editor). When the word is used by itself, it usually refers to Navigator. I follow this convention throughout this tutorial. The first thing to grasp about Netscape is that it is one of many web browsers on the market. It was not the first and is not necessarily the best, but it still retains the majority of the market share (and mindshare). It is important to know this because Netscape interprets html text in its own way. In particular, there are subtle differences between the way Netscape and Internet Explorer, its next biggest competitor, represent html tags. Moreover, there are differences between the way earlier versions and current versions of Netscape represent tags. You don't need to know any of the specific differences, just that they exist. If Netscape and Internet Explorer differ in the interpretation of html, they can be like two ships passing in the night when interpreting dhtml, or "Dynamic HTML." Essentially, dhtml combines the use of JavaScript with a standard known as css, or "Cascading Style Sheets," so that web pages can be made "interactive." We won't go into dhtml in this tutorial. Just know that certain fancy web pages will work completely differently -- or not work at all -- in different web browswers. Netscape allows users to view Java "applets" inside of web page. Applets are smallish programs that get downloaded to the browser and then get run on the user's local machine, just as if you loaded it from your own harddrive. Although Java is supposed to be a cross-platform standard, in practice it is not. Like dhtml, your mileage may (will) vary. Again, we will not go into Java applets in this tutorial, except to show you how you can tell if an applet is running, if it is running properly, and how to disable Java functionality altogether. --> Begin the tutorial here
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© 1998 Rafael C. Alvarado,
McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, Princeton University. |