Steven Finkelman (slfink at netcom.com) wrote:
: I am using a remote server. I have a pc, I dial into a pop as a terminal,
: and communicate with netcom. netcom communicates with the world.
Rephrasing,
"I can use electronic mail and a VT100 terminal type. Can I use WWW? "
Answer 1 - electronic mail:
The option to receive HTML files by electronic mail requires that you
run a program which allows for 'local' loads of HTML files. This means
that any file which is in html can be loaded from disk, and displayed
nicely. This is a _formatting_ process. As soon as you access a link which
is pointing to a http or any other resource which is unavailable to your
station interpreting the file locally, you will fail.
Consequence:
Yes you can read HTML files if received from electronic mail. However,
the 'surfing on the net' requires that you have interactive access to the
internet with a
<a href = http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Clients>
suitable client program </a> called 'WWW browser'.
Answer 2 - VT100:
Despite the fact that 'Mosaic' is much nicer to use and allows the
display of in-line images and various goodies associated with graphics,
the
< a href=http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Lynx/Status.html> LYNX </a>
browser allows you to utilize plain VT100 type of communications. The display
of graphics *in-line* is not possible and you have to hope that people
used something as a replacement (e.g., the 'ALT' directive like the
following:
<img src=http://www.ch.embnet.org/embnet.news/vol1_1/item.gif alt= +>
This will have displayed the graphics 'gif' as in-lined image but on LYNX
it will be visible only as '+' character. If it were
<a href = http://www.ch.embnet.org/embnet.news/vol1_1/item.gif> an image </a>
then this would be a hypertext link to a external image, and, depending
on how LYNX is configured, it can possibly handle this by archiving the
file on disk
and allowing a conversion into a printable format.
Consequence:
You can possibly run WWW in very convenient way on VT100 if you do not
require clickable images (type ISMAP) or in-line images (those pages which
come with graphics) that do not have a textual representation.
LYNX is used my many people out there and it runs on many platforms.
: What software is there use html format pages?
If you run a WWW browser locally, there is the page at Cern which lists
all possible clients, including those for Mac and PC.
: Is there a better terminal type I can set my emulator to than vt-100?
: (communication package is procomm plus v2.0 for windows)
There is no ultimate need to do so - VT100 is fine for LYNX, and Mosaic
is graphics-driven anyway.
regards
Reinhard
--
+---------------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| Dr. Reinhard Doelz | Tel. x41 61 2672247 Fax x41 61 2672078 |
| Biocomputing | electronic Mail doelz at urz.unibas.ch |
|Biozentrum der Universitaet+-------------------------------------------+
