WORLD WIDE WEB FAQ

_World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions (With Answers, of Course!)_

This document is available from many sites, and in several languages.
_Please use the site closest to you in the language of your choice._

This FAQ consists of many files. By popular request, it is now
available as an MSDOS .ZIP file, as a Unix compressed .tar file, and
as a single, large text file. If you have trouble browsing HTML files
offline under Windows, please see the relevant FAQ entry.

Of course, to get the latest and greatest information, it is best to
browse it right here on the web!

Contents

* About this document
* Recent changes to the FAQ
* Introduction to the World Wide Web
* Obtaining and using web browsers
* Establishing and using web servers
* Authoring web pages, images and scripts
* Other resources about the Web
* Credits

Overview of the World Wide Web

Contents:
* What is the Web?
* What is a URL?
* What are SGML and HTML?
* How does the Web compare to Gopher and WAIS?
* What is the W3 consortium?
* How can I access the Web?
* What is available through the web?
* How do I find out what's new on the Web?
* Where is the subject catalog of the Web?
* How can I search through ALL web sites?
* Can I catch a virus from a web page?
* How can I find out when a web page has changed?
* How do I publish on the Web?
* Who uses the Web?
* What is VRML?
* What is Java?
* What can I do to protect my legal rights on the web?

Obtaining and using web browsers

Contents:
* Browsers accessible by telnet
* Obtaining Amiga browsers
* Obtaining Macintosh browsers
* Obtaining MS-DOS (non-Windows) browsers
* Obtaining NeXT browsers
* Obtaining Unix and VMS browsers
* Obtaining VM/CMS browsers
* Obtaining Microsoft Windows and OS/2 browsers
* Obtaining X Window System / DecWindows browsers
* Obtaining Acorn RISCOS browsers
* Obtaining batch-mode "browsers"
* I can't get SLIP or PPP. I want web access. Is there a way?
* Can I browse HTML files locally when I'm offline?
* How can I access the Web through a firewall?
* I'm running XMosaic. Why don't my external viewers work?
* I have a Windows PC or a Mac. Why can't I access WAIS URLs?
* How do I convert HTML to (plain ASCII, PostScript, other printable
formats)?
* How can I save an inline image to disk?
* How can I send newsgroup posts in HTML to my web browser?
* How can I get sound from the PC speaker with WinMosaic?

Establishing and using web servers

Contents:
* Amiga servers
* Macintosh servers
* MS-DOS and Novell Netware servers
* Unix servers
* VM/CMS servers
* VMS servers
* IBM OS/2 Servers
* Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 95 Servers
* Microsoft Windows 3.1 Servers
* Servers for Embedded Applications
* Can I serve two domains from one server?
* Comparison: which server is best?
* How fast does my connection have to be?
* How can I make my web site searchable?
* How can I get my server to recognize both .htm and .html?
* Do I have to approve every imagemap my users create?
* Can I safely allow my users to run their own CGI scripts?
* Can I lease space on an existing server?
* How can I keep robots off my server?
* How do I publicize my server?
* How can I secure access to my server?
* Can I prevent others from studying my HTML?
* How can I keep statistics on my server?
* How can I serve [Word documents, Excel spreadsheets...] through my
server?

Authoring web pages, images and scripts

Contents:
* Overview: how to create web documents
* Writing HTML documents yourself
* HTML editors
* Converting other formats to HTML
* Checking web pages for errors
* How can I "include" one HTML document in another?
* How can I include a "back" button in my web page?
* How can I create a background and choose my own text colors?
* Generating web pages from a program (CGI)
* How can I keep "state" information between CGI calls?
* How can I identify the user accessing my CGI script?
* My CGI script doesn't work! What's wrong?
* How can I keep my document from being cached?
* How can users send me comments and/or email?
* How can I create fill-out forms?
* Are HTML 3.0 tables ready? Are there other options?
* How can I use inline images without alienating my users?
* Can I create animations in my web page?
* How can I distribute audio through the web?
* How can I generate inline images on the fly?
* What is HTML 3.0?
* How do I comment an HTML document?
* How do I create clickable image maps?
* How can I create transparent and interlaced GIFs? What are they?
* Why do my transparent GIFs look (grainy, chunky, not so
transparent)...
* Which is better for the web, JPEG or GIF?
* What is a progressive JPEG? How can I produce progressive JPEGs?
* Can I lease space on an existing server?
* Can I make a link that doesn't load a new page?
* How can I redirect the browser to a new URL?
* How can the user download binaries from my server?
* How can I mirror part of another server?
* Does mailto: work in all browsers?
* How can I serve [Word documents, Excel spreadsheets...] through my
server?
* How do I publicize my work?
* Hey, why can't I write a web-exploring robot?
* Where can I get an access counter for my page?

Other resources about the Web

Contents:
* Books about the Web
* Mailing lists about the Web
* Newsgroups about the Web
* IRC channels about the Web (real-time chat)

Credits

ABOUT THE WORLD WIDE WEB FAQ

The World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is intended to
answer the most common questions about the web.

The FAQ is maintained by by Thomas Boutell
<URL:http://www.boutell.com/boutell/>. Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 by
Thomas Boutell and Boutell.Com, Inc.

The complete FAQ is available from several sites. If you can, you will
want to access it through the web. Use the site closest to you in the
language you prefer (non-English sites are marked);

* Boutell.Com, Inc., western United States (North America):
<URL:http://www.boutell.com/faq/>
* DBasics Software Company, western United States (North America):
<URL:http://www.dbasic.com/users_group/wwwfaq>
* Compusult Inc., California, USA (North America):
<URL:http://www.compusult.nf.ca/WWW_FAQ/index.htm>
* Seton Hall University, eastern United States (North America):
<URL:http://www.shu.edu/about/WWWFaq/>
* United States Military Academy, West Point (North America):
<URL:http://www.usma.edu/mirror/WWW/faq/>
* Oxford University, UK (Europe):
<URL:http://info.ox.ac.uk/help/wwwfaq/index.html>
* Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland (Europe, in
Polish):
<URL:http://www.put.poznan.pl/hypertext/Internet/faq/www/www_pl.ht
m>
* Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland (Europe, in
English):
<URL:http://www.put.poznan.pl/hypertext/Internet/faq/www/www_en.ht
m>
* New Software Technologies Service, Austria (Europe):
<URL:http://nswt.tuwien.ac.at:8000/htdocs/boutell/>
* Astronomical Observatory of Padova, Italy (Europe):
<URL:http://www.pd.astro.it/faqes/www/>
* University of Jan Evangelista Purkyne, Czech Republic (Europe):
<URL:http://sun.ujep.cz/wwwfaq/>
* University of Oviedo, Spain (Europe):
<URL:http://www3.uniovi.es/~rivero/WWW/faq/>
* Glocom, Japan (Asia):
<URL:http://www.glocom.ac.jp/mirror/sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/faq/>
* The University of Melbourne (Australia/Pacific):
<URL:http://www.unimelb.edu.au/public/www-faq/>
* Telstra Corporation, Australia (Australia/Pacific):
<URL:http://www.telstra.com.au/docs/www-faq/>
* Internex Online, Toronto, Canada (North America):
<URL:http://www.io.org/faq/www/>
* Communications Vir, Montreal, Canada (North America):
<URL:http://www.vir.com/WWWfaq/index.html>
* Community Access Canada, University of New Brunswick, Canada
(North America): <URL:http://cnet.unb.ca/www/faq/>
* Island Internet, British Columbia, Canada (North America):
<URL:http://www.island.net/help/faq/www_faq/>
* Acer Inc., Taipei, Taiwan (Asia, in Chinese):
<URL:http://www.acer.net/document/cwwwfaq/>
* Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan (Asia):
<URL:http://www.sinica.edu.tw/www/faq/boutell/index.htm>
* Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Darmstadt, Germany:
<URL:http://www.igd.fhg.de/www/documents/servers/mirrors/www-faq/>

* Mikomtek, CSIR (South Africa):
<URL:http://www.mikom.csir.co.za/faq/www/index.htm>
* Michael Babcock at www.feldspar.com (Ontario, Canada):
<URL:http://www.feldspar.com/~mbabcock/WWW_FAQ/>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

RECENT CHANGES TO THE FAQ

I have completed a book entitled "CGI Programming in C and Perl,"
which will be available on April 23rd, 1996. Writing this book caused
some delays between FAQ updates. I hope you will find that the book is
worth the wait. The ISBN is 0-201-93329-2.
<URL:http://www.boutell.com/cgibook/>

4/11/96:
* New Amiga browsers
* New HTML editors
* New books; section reorganized
* New Web search facilities
* New WWW newsgroup archives
* More VM/CMS web servers
* Statistics tools updated
* New information about content types
* New information about binary downloads
* New Windows NT web servers
* New Unix web servers
* Servers for embedded systems
* Protecting your legal rights on the Web
* Assembling images on the fly on the Mac using clip2gif
* Sources for backgrounds, icons, etc.
* "What is on the web?" rewritten
* Amiga browser updates
* Teaching your server to treat .html and .htm alike
* Using WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to speed up images
* Novell's official Netware web server product
* Bandwidth section updated by Mike Meyer
* Animation information
* Numerous updated links
* Many assorted updates

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CREDITS

Maintainer (11/93 to present): Thomas Boutell, _<boutell@boutell.com>_

Former Maintainer (until 11/93): Nathan Torkington,
_<Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz>_
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT ARE WWW, HYPERTEXT AND HYPERMEDIA?

WWW stands for "World Wide Web." The WWW project, started by Tim
Berners-Lee while at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics), seeks to build a "distributed hypermedia system." In
practice, the web is a vast collection of interconnected documents,
spanning the world. Tim Berners-Lee continues his pioneering work with
the W3 Consortium at MIT.

The advantage of hypertext is that in a hypertext document, if you
want more information about a particular subject mentioned, you can
usually "just click on it" to read further detail. In fact, documents
can be and often are linked to other documents by completely different
authors -- much like footnoting, but you can get the referenced
document instantly!

To access the web, you run a browser program. The browser reads
documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information
providers set up hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents
from.

The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet
news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods.
On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers
will permit searches of documents and databases.

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents.
Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you
deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and
you are presented with the text that is pointed to.

Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with
pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a
text file, but might display images or sound or animations.

shop Contact Lens low Price shop
_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT IS A URL?

URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator". It is a draft standard for
specifying an object on the Internet, such as a file or newsgroup.

URLs look like this: (file: and ftp: URLs are synonymous.)
* file://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip
* ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors
* http://www.w3.org:80/default.html
* news:alt.hypertext
* telnet://dra.com

The first part of the URL, before the colon, specifies the access
method. The part of the URL after the colon is interpreted specific to
the access method. In general, two slashes after the colon indicate a
machine name (machine:port is also valid).

When you are told to "check out this URL", what to do next depends on
your browser; please check the help for your particular browser. For
the line-mode browser at CERN, which you will quite possibly use first
via telnet, the command to try a URL is "GO URL" (substitute the
actual URL of course). In Lynx you just select the "GO" link on the
first page you see; in graphical browsers, there's usually an "Open
URL" option in the menus.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT ARE SGML AND HTML?

Documents on the World Wide Web are written in a simple "markup
language" called HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language.

SGML is a much broader language which is used to define particular
markup languages for particular purposes. HTML is just a specific
application of SGML. You can learn more about SGML, and the rationale
behind HTML, by reading A Gentle Introduction to SGML (URL is
<URL:http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/tei-tocs?div=DIV1&id=SG> ), a
document provided by the Text Encoding Initiative.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DOES WWW COMPARE TO GOPHER AND WAIS?

While all three of these information presentation systems are
client-server based, they differ in terms of their model of data. In
gopher, data is either a menu, a document, an index or a telnet
connection. In WAIS, everything is an index and everything that is
returned from the index is a document. In WWW, everything is a
(possibly) hypertext document which may be searchable.

In practice, this means that WWW can represent the gopher (a menu is a
list of links, a gopher document is a hypertext document without
links, searches are the same, telnet sessions are the same) and WAIS
(a WAIS index is a searchable page, returning a document with no
links) data models as well as providing extra functionality.

World Wide Web usage grew far beyond Gopher usage in the last few
months, according to the statistics-keepers of the Internet backbone.
(Of course, World Wide Web browsers can also access Gopher servers,
which inflates the numbers for the latter.) WWW has long since reached
critical mass, with new commercial and noncommercial sites appearing
daily.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT IS THE W3 CONSORTIUM?

The W3 consortium is an industry consortium headed by the Laboratory
for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The
W3 consortium seeks to promote standards and encourage
interoperability between WWW products. See <URL:http://www.w3.org> for
more information.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

INTRODUCTION: HOW CAN I ACCESS THE WEB?

You have two basic options: use a browser on your own machine (the
best option) or use a browser that can be telnetted to (not nearly as
good, but possible). Web access by email is available, but very
marginal. Note, however, that the traditional online services such as
AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve now offer web access of one degree or
another as a standard feature. Real web access is finally easy to come
by for all PC users, at least in North America.

It is always best to run a browser on your own machine, unless you
absolutely cannot do so; but feel free to telnet to a browser for your
first look at the web, or use email if the telnet command does not
work on your system (_try it first!_). Note that "your machine" can be
defined as a system you dial into from home, such as netcom or another
account provider. Running a text-based browser on such a system is
still preferable to telnetting to a faraway site.

Access to the web _by email_ is possible once again, but obtaining a
better grade of Internet access that allows you to run a web browser
is strongly encouraged. To use the service, send mail to
webmail@curia.ucc.ie with "go http://www.boutell.com/faq/" in the body
of your mail (don't type the quotation marks). You will receive the
top page of the web version of this FAQ, which you can use as a
starting point for your explorations.

There is one low-tech solution: web by FAX! Consider the following
information, submitted by Bill Stearns:

If you have access to a fax machine, do the following:

1) Call 805-730-7777 from your fax machine.

2) Select number 2 (I have the document ID already)

3) Type in the document ID; for the above page, it's 17571, then
press # (the pound symbol)

4) Press pound at the next prompt if you're calling from your fax
machine, or enter the phone number of your fax machine and then
press pound.

5) Wait for that page to come over, and then repeat the process with
the 5 or 6 digit number in brackets next to the link you'd like to
follow.

A few other useful pages:

17581 800 number (toll-free) service providers

17582 The list of area codes - a good place to start as well if
you're in the U.S.

By the way, this free service is provided by Universal Access
(http://www.ua.com/, document number 16968) and is not limited to
just this directory. If you know the name of the machine hosting the
web page you want to view, you can probably reach it through this
service. You simply type in the name of the machine
(www.teleport.com, for example) at menu option 3. When you've
received the home page for the site, keep following the trail to the
page you'd like. It takes a while and some long distance calls, but
the service is otherwise free.

My sincere thanks both to Universal Access and the Celestin company
for providing these services.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT IS ON THE WEB?

_[Obscure technical answer deleted]_

By now, the Web is becoming a mainstream publishing medium in its own
right. As such, virtually everything is available somewhere on the
Web. Because it is cheaper to publish on the web than it is to publish
on paper or in the other electronic media, a wide range of interests
are represented. This is limited only by the fact that the population
of the Internet is not yet as diverse as the population of the real
world. Fortunately, that is changing as web access becomes more and
more readily available.

The real question is more often "how do I search the Web to find what
I want?" or perhaps "where is the card catalog of the Web?". Those
questions are also answered in this document.
_________________________________________________________________

Contractor - Contractor2 - Contractor3 - Contractor4 - Contractor5 - Contractor6 - Contractor7 - Contractor8 - Contractor9

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DO I FIND OUT WHAT'S NEW ON THE WEB?

comp.infosystems.www.announce
The newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.announce carries
announcements of new resources on the World Wide Web. Since
newsgroups are distributed, it can be accessed reliably even
when the net is very busy.

What's New With NCSA Mosaic
The unofficial newspaper of the World Wide Web is What's New
With NCSA Mosaic (URL is
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.htm
l ), which carries announcements of new servers on the web and
also of new web-related tools. This should be in your hot list
if you're not using Mosaic (which can access it directly
through the help menu).

comp.internet.net-happinings
You can also check out the newsgroup
comp.internet.net-happenings, which carries WWW announcements
and many other Internet-related announcements.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHERE IS THE SUBJECT CATALOG OF THE WEB?

There are several. There is no mechanism inherent in the web which
forces the creation of a single catalog (although there is work
underway on automatic mechanisms to catalog web sites). Also be sure
to check out the entry on how to search the web.

Yahoo (URL is <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/> ) is probably the most
complete hierarchical, topical index of web sites, and also features a
sophisticated search facility.

The original catalog of the web was the WWW Virtual Library (URL is
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html ),
maintained by CERN and later by the W3 Consortium. The Virtual Library
is a good place to find resources on a particular subject, and has
separate maintainers for many subject areas.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I SEARCH THROUGH ALL WEB SITES?

Several people have written robots which create indexes of web sites
-- including sites which have not arranged to be mentioned in the
newspapers and catalogs above. (Before writing your own robot, please
read the entry in the authoring section regarding robots.)

Here are a few such automatic indexes you can search:

Alta Vista
(URL is <URL:http://www.altavista.digital.com> ) is probably
the most powerful web searching facility at this time, with an
exhaustive database and the capability to search USENET
newsgroups as well as web sites. The query language is also
powerful.

Yahoo
(URL is <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/> ) is probably the most
complete hierarchical, topical index of web sites, and also
features a sophisticated search facility.

Lycos
(URL is <URL:http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-home.html> )
is another web-indexing robot, which includes the ability to
submit the URLs of your own documents by hand, ensuring that
they are available for searching.

WebCrawler
(URL is <URL:http://webcrawler.com.html> ) builds an
impressively complete index; on the other hand, since it
indexes the content of documents, it may find many links that
aren't exactly what you had in mind. However, it does a good
job of sorting the documents it finds according to how closely
they match your search.

World Wide Web Worm
(URL is http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html )
builds its index based on page titles and URL contents only.
This is somewhat less inclusive, but pages it finds are more
likely to be an exact match with your needs.

InfoSeek
<URL:http://www.infoseek.com/> is a commercial search service
which also offers a free web search facility
<URL:http://www2.infoseek.com>. You can specify phrases to
locate, among other query operations, and InfoSeek's commercial
service can search more than just web pages (newsgroups, for
instance). InfoSeek's commercial service charges 10 cents per
query and offers a free trial to new users. (Increasing load on
the free search servers makes this sound better every day.)

OpenText
(URL is <URL:http://www.opentext.com> ) also offers a robust
web searching facility.

You can read about other search robots and the principles behind them
in the robots section.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CAN I CATCH A VIRUS BY LOOKING AT A WEB PAGE?

_No._

Your computer can, of course, catch a virus if you download an
executable program from an untrustworthy site and then, of your own
free will, double-click on it in your file manager (or Mac desktop,
or...). This is the same risk you run when downloading programs from
bulletin board systems or via anonymous FTP.

Viewing images, filling out forms and so on is harmless. So, most
likely, is downloading a program from a respectable source with a
reputation to protect.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I FIND OUT IF A WEB PAGE HAS BEEN UPDATED?

Most of the time, web servers deliver information only when you ask
for it. Usually this is a good thing, but in some cases you may want
to be notified when a web page has changed. When you want notification
that a page has changed, consider using URL-minder (URL is
<http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/URL-minder.html > ), a web-browsing
robot which will automatically notify you by email when a page of
interest to you has been updated.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I PROVIDE INFORMATION TO THE WEB?

Information providers run programs that the browsers can obtain
hypertext from. These programs can either be WWW servers that
understand the HyperText Transfer Protocol HTTP (best if you are
creating your information database from scratch), "gateway" programs
that convert an existing information format to hypertext, or a
non-HTTP server that WWW browsers can access -- anonymous FTP or
gopher, for example.

To learn more about World Wide Web servers, see the server section.
You can also consult a www server primer by Nathan Torkington,
available at the URL
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/who/Nathan.Torkington/ideas/www-servers.html .

If you only want to provide information to local users, placing your
information in local files is also an option. This means, however,
that there can be no off-machine access.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHO USES THE WEB?

Good question! The web is certainly biased toward the thirtyish,
anglo-saxon, male and technology-friendly crowd at this point, but
there's more to the story; the demographics of the web are changing
rapidly as the user base grows. The GVU WWW User Survey (URL is
<URL:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/User_Survey_Home.html>
) attempts to answer the question in detail. You can access the
results of past surveys and contribute information of your own.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT IS VRML?

VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, is an attempt to extend
the web into the domain of three-dimensional graphics. VRML "worlds"
can depict realistic or otherworldly places, which can contain objects
that link to other documents or VRML worlds on the web.

For more information about VRML, including where to find browsers and
other VRML tools for your system, consult the VRML Home Page at Wired
(URL is <URL:http://vrml.wired.com/> ) for general technical
information about the effort, and the WebSpace home page at SGI (URL
is <URL:http://www.sgi.com/Products/WebFORCE/WebSpace>) for the first
VRML viewer to become available. You may also wish to check out the
home page of VRWeb <URL:http://hgiicm.tu-graz.ac.at/Cvrweb>, another
VRML browser available for Microsoft Windows and the X Window System.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT IS JAVA?

Java is a language developed by Sun Microsystems which allows World
Wide Web pages to contain code that is executed on the browser.
Because Java is based on a single "virtual machine" that all
implementations of java emulate, it is possible for Java programs to
run on any system which has a version of Java. It is also possible for
the "virtual machine" emulator to make sure that Java programs
downloaded through the web do not attempt to do unauthorized things.

Actually, Java can be used in the absence of the web, but the
application that has sparked so much interest in Java is HotJava, a
web browser written in the Java language. You can learn more about
Java and HotJava from Sun's HotJava home page (URL is
<URL:http://java.sun.com/> ).
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT CAN I DO TO PROTECT MY LEGAL RIGHTS ON THE WEB?

This question is analyzed in admirable detail by the Weblaw Page
<URL:www.patents.com/weblaw.sht>. _Disclaimer:_ Neither that page nor
this FAQ constitutes legal advice.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

BROWSERS ACCESSIBLE BY TELNET

An up-to-date list of these is available on the Web as
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Bootstrap.html and should be
regarded as an authoritative list.

telnet.w3.org
A telnettable browser provided by the W3 coalition.

www.cc.ukans.edu
Offers Lynx, a full screen browser which requires a vt100
terminal. Log in as www. Does not allow users to "go" to
arbitrary URLs, so GET YOUR OWN COPY of Lynx and install it on
your system if your administrator has not done so already. Lynx
is the best plain-text browser, so move mountains if necessary
to get your own copy of Lynx!

www.njit.edu
(or telnet 128.235.163.2) Log in as www. A full-screen browser
in New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA.

www.huji.ac.il
A dual-language Hebrew/English database, with links to the rest
of the world. The line mode browser, plus extra features. Log
in as www. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

info.funet.fi
(or telnet 128.214.6.102). Log in as www. Offers several
browsers, including Lynx.

fserv.kfki.hu
Hungary. Has slow link, use from nearby. Login is as www.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

AMIGA BROWSERS

IBrowse
An AmigaOS browser that supports many Netscape extensions to
HTML, as well as forms and progressive image rendering. This
browser is a new, commercial browser from the authors of the
Amiga Mosaic port (see below).
<URL:http://www.omnipresence.com/ibrowse/>

AMosaic
Browser for AmigaOS, based on NCSA's Mosaic. Supports older
Amigas as well as the newer machines in the latest versions.
Supports frames as well. See
<URL:http://www.omnipresence.com/amosaic/2.0>. See also the
FAQ available at
<URL:http://www.phone.net/ATCPFAQ/amosaic.html> .

Amiga Lynx
An Amiga version of the Lynx text-based browser. See
<URL:http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/amiga/alynx.html>.

Emacs w3-mode
A WWW browser for emacs. Runs under Gnu Emacs on the Amiga. Has
fonts, color, inline images, and mouse support if using Lemacs,
Epoch, or Emacs 19. Available by anonymous ftp from
ftp.cs.indiana.edu in the directory pub/elisp/w3.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MACINTOSH BROWSERS

NOTE: These browsers require that you have SLIP, PPP or other TCP/IP
networking on your PC. SLIP or PPP can be accomplished over phone
lines. You can do this one of two ways: using a proper SLIP account,
which requires the active cooperation of your network provider or
educational institution (see Frank Hecker's guide to SLIP and PPP
access; URL is <URL:http://access.digex.net/~hecker/> ; ), or using
The Internet Adapter or SLiRP, products which simulate SLIP through
your dialup Unix shell account. If you only have non-Unix based dialup
shell access, or have no PC at home, your best option at this time is
to run Lynx on the VMS (or Unix, or...) system you call, or telnet to
a browser if you cannot do so.

NCSA Mosaic for Macintosh
From NCSA. Full featured. Available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the directory Mac/Mosaic.

Netscape
From Netscape Communications Corp (URL is:
<URL:http://www.netscape.com> ). Netscape has consistently
released new features first. Version 2.0 supports custom
"applets" written in the programming language Java, as well as
new HTML features such as frames (displaying more than one
document in the same browser window). Netscape also has strong
table support, in addition to many extensions to HTML, not all
of which conform to the proposed standard. Netscape is a
commercial product but can be evaluated free of charge for 90
days by individuals. The 16-bit version works under both OS/2
and Windows. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.netscape.com
in the netscape subdirectory. See Netscape's web site for
information about mirror sites.

MacWeb
From EINet. Has features that Mosaic lacks; lacks some features
that Mosaic has. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.einet.net
in the directory einet/mac/macweb.

Enhanced Mosaic
Enhanced Mosaic, from Spyglass, Incorporated, is the commercial
version of NCSA Mosaic. Spyglass does sell the browser directly
to the public, although you can download an evaluation version
to try it out; instead, they seek to license it to various
OEMs. You can learn more about their licensing arrangements and
the existing licensees from the Spyglass home page (URL is
<URL:http://www.spyglass.com/> ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MSDOS BROWSERS

NOTE: These browsers require that you have SLIP, PPP or other TCP/IP
networking on your PC. SLIP or PPP can be accomplished over phone
lines. You can do this one of two ways: using a proper SLIP account,
which requires the active cooperation of your network provider or
educational institution, or using The Internet Adapter or SLiRP,
products which simulate SLIP through your dialup Unix shell account.
If you only have non-Unix based dialup shell access, or have no PC at
home, your best option at this time is to run Lynx on the VMS (or
Unix, or...) system you call, or telnet to a browser if you cannot do
so.

DosLynx
DosLynx is an excellent text-based browser for use on DOS
systems. You must have a level 1 packet driver, or an emulation
thereof, or you will only be able to browse local files;
essentially, if your PC has an Ethernet connection, or you have
SLIP, you should be able to use it. DosLynx can view GIF
images, but not when they are inline images (as of this
writing). See the README.HTM file at the DosLynx site for
details. You can obtain DosLynx by anonymous FTP from
ftp2.cc.ukans.edu in the directory pub/WWW/DosLynx; the URL is
ftp://ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/WWW/DosLynx/.

Minuet
An all-in-one Internet access package for MSDOS. Includes both
text-mode and graphics-mode display. Available by anonymous FTP
from minuet.micro.umn.edu in the directory
pub/minuet/latest/minuarc.exe.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

NEXTSTEP BROWSERS

Note: NeXTStep systems can also run X-based browsers using one of the
widely used X server products for the NeXT. The browsers listed here,
by contrast, are native NeXTStep applications.

SpiderWoman
A multithreaded, graphical browser for NeXTStep. Available by
anonymous FTP from sente.epfl.ch in the directory pub/software
(URL is <URL:http://sente.epfl.ch/> ).

Netsurfer
Another true NeXTStep browser. Available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.thoughtport.com in the directory /pub/next/netsurfer (URL
is <URL:http://www.netsurfer.com/> ).

OmniWeb
A World Wide Web browser for NeXTStep. The URL for more
information is http://www.omnigroup.com/; you can ftp the
package from ftp.omnigroup.com in the /pub/software/ directory.

WorldWideWeb, CERN's NeXT Browser-Editor
A browser/editor for NeXTStep. _Currently out of date; editor
not operational._ Allows wysiwyg hypertext editing. Requires
NeXTStep 3.0. Available for anonymous FTP from ftp.w3.org in
the directory /pub/www/src.

Emacs w3-mode
A WWW browser for emacs. Runs under Xwindows, NeXTstep, VMS,
OS/2, Windows NT, Windows 3.1, AmigaDOS, or just about any Unix
system. Also has fonts, color, inline images, and mouse support
if using Lemacs, Epoch, or Emacs 19. Also works in local mode
under DOS and on the Macintosh. Available by anonymous ftp from
ftp.cs.indiana.edu in the directory pub/elisp/w3.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

TEXT-MODE UNIX AND VMS BROWSERS

These are text-based browsers for Unix (and in some cases also VMS)
systems. In many cases your system administrator will have already
installed one or more of these packages; check before compiling your
own copy.

Line Mode Browser
This program gives W3 readership to anyone with a dumb
terminal. A general purpose information retrieval tool.
Available by anonymous ftp from www.w3.org in the directory
/pub/www/src.

The "Lynx" full screen browser
This is a hypertext browser for vt100s using full screen, arrow
keys, highlighting, etc. Available by anonymous FTP from
ftp2.cc.ukans.edu.

Tom Fine's perlWWW
A tty-based browser written in perl. Available by anonymous FTP
from archive.cis.ohio-state.edu in the directory pub/w3browser
as the file w3browser-0.1.shar.

For VMS
Dudu Rashty's full screen client based on VMS's SMG screen
management routines. Available by anonymous FTP from
vms.huji.ac.il in the directory www/www_client.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

VM/CMS BROWSERS

Albert
A WWW browser for the VM/CMS operating system. Available by
anonymous FTP from ftp.nerdc.ufl.edu in the directory
pub/vm/www/.

Charlotte A full-screen VM/CMS browser written in REXX, Pipelines and
REXX Sockets which runs without changes on any version of CMS
from 5 to 11. (URL is <URL:gopher://p370.bcsc.gov.bc.ca> ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MICROSOFT WINDOWS BROWSERS

NOTE: Most of these browsers require that you have SLIP, PPP or other
TCP/IP networking on your PC. The exceptions are SlipKnot and I-COMM,
which have slightly more limited features but operate without a proper
Internet connection. SLIP or PPP can be accomplished over phone lines.
You can do this one of two ways: using a proper SLIP account, which
requires the active cooperation of your network provider or
educational institution (see Frank Hecker's guide to SLIP and PPP
access; URL is <URL:http://access.digex.net/~hecker/> ), or by using
The Internet Adapter or SLiRP, products which simulate SLIP through
your dialup Unix shell account. Another product, TwinSock at
<URL:http://ugsparc0.eecg.utoronto.ca/~luk/Welcome.html>, provides
equivalent functionality under Windows using its own proxy protocol.
If you only have non-Unix based dialup shell access, or have no PC at
home, your best option at this time is to run Lynx on the VMS (or
Unix, or...) system you call, or telnet to a browser if you cannot do
so.

Mosaic for Windows
From NCSA. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
the directory PC/Windows/Mosaic, or learn more about it on the
web:
<URL:http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MosaicForWindows/Status.ht
ml> The latest versions of WinMosaic support innovative
features such as "AutoSurf", which can automatically retrieve
documents related to the current document to save download
time.

Quarterdeck Mosaic
From Quarterdeck. Supports incremental image loading, forms,
new HTML extensions and other modern web browser features.
Includes Internet connectivity software and advanced
history-keeping features, as well as private annotations of web
pages. A 30-day evaluation copy is available on the web
<URL:http://www.qdeck.com/qdeck/demosoft/QMosaic/>.

Compuserve Mosaic
From Compuserve (Spry is now part of Compuserve). Works under
Windows and OS/2. Supports the mailto: URL, transparent GIFs,
ALT tags, hierarchical hotlists, progressive image rendering,
and so forth.

Internet Explorer
<URL:http://www.microsoft.com/>, from Microsoft. Supports
incremental image loading, forms, HTTP keep-alive, tables (in
the latest betas as of this writing), and many Netscape
extensions and unique Microsoft extensions to HTML.

Internetworks
From Internetworks, formerly (?) Booklink. Available by
anonymous FTP from ftp.booklink.com in the directory lite; this
is a demonstration version of the full browser, which costs
$99. Booklink can open many simultaneous connections in
different windows and display images and pages progressively;
at the time of this writing it is the only browser to equal
Netscape in this area. The "lite" version can only open two
simultaneous connections, however.

SlipKnot
SlipKnot is a graphical WWW browser that operates entirely
without SLIP, PPP, an Ethernet connection, or special
server-side software (but read the SLIP emulator section for
another workaround). SlipKnot features the ability to
automatically retrieve all documents linked to by the current
document while the current document is being read. SlipKnot
supports multiple fonts, inline images, forms, and review of
documents you have already received while new documents arrive.
SlipKnot can also download "nearby" documents in advance to
save download time. Like I-COMM, SlipKnot operates entirely
through a Unix shell account, not over TCP/IP. SlipKnot does
_not_ require that you install any new software on your Unix
shell account. You can obtain SlipKnot by anonymous FTP from
oak.oakland.edu in the directory SimTel/win3/internet. For more
information, see the SlipKnot information page (URL is
http://www.interport.net/slipknot/slipknot.html ) or send a
blank email message to slipknot@micromind.com.

I-COMM
I-COMM, like SlipKnot, operates without a true TCP/IP
connection. It requires a Unix shell account, like SlipKnot, or
a VMS shell account, a feature unique to I-COMM. I-COMM also
features Zmodem file transfers in both directions and complete
support for forms. I-COMM is available for evaluation as
shareware (URL is <URL:http://www.best.com/~icomm/icomm.htm>).

IBM OS/2 WebExplorer
A native IBM OS/2 web browser. WebExplorer is a multithreaded
application and, in addition to the usual "back" and "forward"
buttons, features a visual map of your exploration of the web.
The software supports progressive image rendering. IBM
WebExplorer can be acquired by anonymous FTP from
ftp01.ny.us.ibm.net in the directory pub/WebExplorer/ .

WebSurfer
Included with the Chameleon TCP/IP software package from
Netmanage, Inc. Reputedly functional and straightforward.

Enhanced Mosaic
Enhanced Mosaic, from Spyglass, Incorporated, is the commercial
version of NCSA Mosaic. Spyglass does not offer the browser
directly to the public; instead, they license it to various
OEMs. You can learn more about their licensing arrangements and
the existing licensees from the Spyglass home page (URL is
<URL:http://www.spyglass.com/> ).

UdiWWW
UdiWWW, unlike all other Windows browsers as of this writing,
supports all of the proposed HTML 3.0 standard (except for
<OVERLAY> and <MATH>) and also supports Netscape's various
nonstandard extensions. UdiWWW is still being tested, but you
can obtain it for yourself and see (URL is
<URL:http://www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/index.htm> ).

Emissary
Emissary, from Wollongong, is both a web browser and a
concerted effort to integrate the Internet into the Windows
environment (see <URL:http://www.twg.com> ). For instance, FTP
sites appear much like drives in the file manager, mail can be
sent via drag and drop, and WYSIWYG HTML editing is included.
Emissary supports several Netscape extensions, but lacks
support for tables.

NetShark
<URL:http://netshark.inter.net>, From InterCon Systems
Corporation <URL:http://www.intercon.com>. Supports incremental
displaying of pages and inline images. Supports extensions to
HTML, including background images. NetShark also includes a
MIME compatible mail client. The Lite version is available free
of charge by anonymous ftp from netshark.inter.net in the
/pub/netshark/ directory.

Cello
Browser from Cornell LII. Available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.law.cornell.edu in the directory /pub/LII/cello.

WinWeb
From EINet. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.einet.net in
the directory /einet/pc/winweb as the file winweb.zip.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

X/DECWINDOWS (GRAPHICAL UNIX, VMS) BROWSERS

MMM
The MMM browser is a Unix/X browser written in the Caml Special
Light programming language with a Tcl/Tk user interface. MMM
supports HTML level 2 and also supports plug-in "applets"
written in Caml Special Light.
<URL:http://pauillac.inria.fr/~rouaix/mmm>

NCSA Mosaic for X
Unix browser using X11/Motif. The original multimedia browser.
Full http 1.0 support including PUT-method forms, image maps,
etc. Recent beta versions have limited support for tables.
Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the
directory Mosaic.

NCSA Mosaic for VMS
Browser using X11/DecWindows/Motif. For the VMS operating
system. Full http 1.0 support including PUT-method forms, image
maps, etc. Probably the best browser available for VMS.
Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.digital.com in the
directory pub/DEC/Mosaic.

Quadralay GWHIS Viewer (Commercial Mosaic)
Quadralay offers a commercial-grade (not free!) version of
Mosaic for Unix systems, with Windows and Macintosh versions
expected in the future. (URL is:
http://www.quadralay.com/products/products.html#gwhis)

tkWWW Browser/Editor for X11
A Unix Browser/Editor for X11 (URL is
<http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TkWWW/Status.html> ). Supports
WSYIWYG HTML editing.

MidasWWW Browser
A Unix/X browser from Tony Johnson. (Beta, works well.)

Viola for X (Beta)
Viola has two versions for Unix/X: one using Motif, one using
Xlib (no Motif). Handles HTML Level 3 forms and tables. Has
extensions for multiple columning, collapsible/expandable list,
client-side document include. Available by anonymous FTP from
ora.com in /pub/www/viola. More information available at the
URL http://xcf.berkeley.edu/ht/projects/viola/README.

Chimera
Unix/X Browser using Athena (doesn't require Motif). Supports
forms, inline images, etc.; closest to Mosaic in feel of the
non-Motif X11 browsers. Available for anonymous FTP from
ftp.cs.unlv.edu in the directory /pub/chimera.

Arena
Arena's primary purpose is to be a testbed for HTML Level 3
documents. As a result, Arena supports many of the new and
interesting features of HTML Level 3. As of this writing it is
still in prerelease and expectations should be set accordingly!
Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.w3.org in the directory
pub/www/arena/ .

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

WHAT BROWSERS ARE AVAILABLE FOR THE ACORN RISCOS SYSTEM?

ANT Suite Browser
ANT Limited offers a complete Internet Suite for the RISC OS
computers which includes a WWW browser and the rest of the
usual Internet-related packages. See
<URL:http://www.ant.co.uk/ant/prod/inetbroch/inet1.html> for
more information.

arcweb
ArcWeb is a World-Wide Web browser for Acorn RISC OS computers,
with RISC OS 3.1 or later.

webster
Another browser, about which I have no further information.

The latter two browsers can be obtained by anonymous FTP from
micros.hensa.ac.uk in the directory micros/arch/riscos.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

BATCH-MODE "BROWSERS"

The following browsers retrieve the contents of the URL specified on
the command line and are intended primarily for use in scripts. Note
that most of the text-based Unix browsers can also do this.

Batch mode browser
A batch-mode "browser", url_get, which is available through the
URL http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~zippy/url_get.html . It can be
retrieved via anonymous FTP to ftp.cc.utexas.edu, as the file
/pub/zippy/url_get.tar.Z. This package is intended for use in
cron jobs and other settings in which fetching a page in a
command-line fashion is useful.

Batch mode browser in tclX
A batch mode "browser" (URL retriever) written in extended Tcl
(tclX) is available as well (URL is
<URL:http://hplyot.obspm.fr/~dl/wwwtools.html> ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

I CAN'T GET SLIP OR PPP. I WANT WEB ACCESS. IS THERE A WAY?

YES! If you have a plain old Unix shell account on a Unix system, such
as a SunOS or Ultrix system, there are two ways around the problem:

GUI Browsers that Talk to Unix
Microsoft Windows users can run SlipKnot or ICOMM, special
browsers which operate using programs that may already be
installed on your shell account (covered in detail in the MS
Windows browsers section).

SLIP/PPP Emulators
Anyone with dialup access to a Unix shell account can use The
Internet Adapter (TIA) or SLiRP, two programs which provide a
pseudo-SLIP connection.

SLiRP is free. TIA is not free, but there is a free two-week
trial period and it is inexpensive.

You can learn more about TIA at
<URL:http://marketplace.com/tia/tiahome.html>.

More information on SLiRP is available at
<URL:http://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/~danjo/>.

If you have a Macintosh, check out the Macintosh TIA Users'
FAQ, <URL:http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/tia/faq.html>, for
additional help.

"So what do I run on my machine at home?"

Exactly the same software you would use for real SLIP; as far
as your PC is concerned, it _is_ a SLIP connection. If you're
unfamiliar with SLIP please check out a newsgroup relevant to
your particular type of machine (Windows, Mac, or even
Unix-based).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CAN I BROWSE HTML FILES LOCALLY WHEN I'M OFFLINE?

If you do not use Microsoft Windows, the answer is usually "no
problem!" Just use the "Open File" or equivalent option on the file
menu of your web browser, instead of "Open Location" or "Open URL".

_Note:_ for the most part, this is not a problem for Windows 95 and
Windows NT users. This section applies primarily to Windows 3.1 users.

If you use Microsoft Windows, and particularly if you use Netscape,
you may have difficulty viewing local files when not connected to the
net. Some web browsers will refuse to run unless there is functioning
Internet software running on the system. Netscape offers a solution to
this problem in the release notes to version 1.1 of their product.
Essentially, you can install an "empty" Internet interface
(winsock.dll) that keeps Netscape happy.

An easy way to do this for users of some Internet connectivity
software is to launch your Internet software but refrain from dialing
out. The details vary from one package of Internet software to
another. It is helpful to change Autoload Home Page=yes to Autoload
Home Page=no in your netscape.ini file in the [Main] section.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I ACCESS THE WEB THROUGH A FIREWALL?

A "proxy server" is a specialized HTTP server which (typically) runs
on a firewall machine, providing access to the outside world for
people inside the firewall. The CERN httpd can be configured to run as
a proxy. Furthermore, it is able to perform caching of documents,
resulting in faster response times.

If you cannot arrange to run a proxy server (definitely the
recommended approach), read on:

For information on using NCSA Mosaic from behind a firewall, please
read the following. In general, browsers can be made useful behind
firewalls through the use of a package called "SOCKS"; the source must
be modified slightly and rebuilt to accommodate this. Whenever
possible, work _with_ your network administrators to solve the
problem, not against them.

An excerpt from the NCSA Mosaic FAQ:

NCSA Mosaic requires a direct internet connection to work, but some
folks have put together a package that works behind firewalls. This is
_completely unsupported_ by NCSA, but here is the latest announcement:

_November 15, 1993:_ C&C Software Technology Center (CSTC) of NEC
Systems Lab has made available a version of SOCKS, a package for
running Internet clients from behind firewalls without breaching
security requirements, that includes a suitably modified version of
Mosaic for X 2.0. _Beware: such a version is not supported by NCSA;
we can't help with questions or problems arising from the
modifications made by others._ But, we encourage you to check it out
if it's interesting to you. Questions and problem notifications can
be sent to Ying-Da Lee (_ylee@syl.dl.nec.com_).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

I'M RUNNING XMOSAIC. WHY CAN'T I GET EXTERNAL VIEWERS WORKING?

Answer provided by Ronald E. Daniel (rdaniel@acl.lanl.gov):

Mosaic only looks at the .mime.types file if it has no idea what the
document's type is. This is actually a very rare situation.
Essentially all servers now use the HTTP/1.0 protocol, which means
that they tell Mosaic (or other browsers) what the document's MIME
Content-type is. The servers use a file very much like Mosaic's
.mime.types file to infer the Content-type from the filename's
extension.

It is pretty simple to find out if this really is the problem. Use
telnet to talk to the server and find out if it is assigning a MIME
type to the document in question. Here's an example, looking at the
home page for my server. (idaknow: is my shell prompt)

idaknow: telnet www.acl.lanl.gov 80 // Connect to the httpd server
Trying 128.165.148.3 ...
Connected to www.acl.lanl.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /Home.html HTTP/1.0 // replace Home.html with your documen
t
// you supply the blank line
HTTP/1.0 200 OK // the rest of this comes from the serve
r Date: Wednesday, 25-May-94 19:18:11 GMT
Server: NCSA/1.1
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html // Here's the MIME Content-type
Last-modified: Monday, 16-May-94 16:21:58 GMT
Content-length: 1727

Connection closed by foreign host.
idaknow:

In the example above, /Home.html will get
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/Home.html .

Normally servers will be configured to supply a Content-type of
text/plain if they don't know what else to do. If this is the
problem you are having, take a look at the TypesConfig documentation
for NCSA's httpd. You can have the server look at the filename
extension, supply the correct Content-type, then use your local
.mailcap file to tell Mosaic what viewer to use to look at the
document.

Russ Segal adds:

The answer from Ronald Daniel is essentially correct, but it needs a
small addendum.

When starting Moasic, you can specify a "fileProxy" which will fetch
files for you:

"*fileProxy: http://socks/"

If you do this, file: URLs are no longer strictly local accesses. So
even if the URL is not http:, the proxy server must be upgraded as
Mr. Daniel suggests.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

I HAVE A WINDOWS PC OR MACINTOSH. WHY CAN'T I ACCESS WAIS URLS?

This answer provided by Michael Grady (m-grady@uiuc.edu):

The version of Mosaic for X has "wais client" code built-in to it.
This was relatively easy for the developers to do, because there was
already a set of library routines for talking to WAIS available for
Unix as "public domain" (freeWAIS). I don't think there is such a
library of routines for PC/Windows or Mac, which would make it much
more difficult for the Mosaic versions for Windows and the Mac to add
"wais client" capability. Therefore, at least for now, neither the
Windows or Mac versions of Mosaic support direct query of a WAIS
server (i.e. can act as wais clients themselves).
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DO I CONVERT HTML TO (PLAIN ASCII, POSTSCRIPT, OTHER PRINTABLE FORMATS)?

There are several ways. Most web browsers have a "save as ascii"
option; the quality of the result varies. Lynx, in particular, being a
text-based browser, does a credible job if you select the print option
and choose "print to local file" instead of an actual printer.
Graphical browsers often have a "save as postscript" option; again,
quality varies.

A product designed expressly for this purpose is HTMLCon (URL is
<URL:http://www.crl.com/~mikekell/index.html> ), a DOS command line
application.

If your browser cannot save as postscript or another format which
preserves in-line graphics, one option is to use Mozilla Print Gidget
. You enter the URL for the page you want to convert and save the
document that comes back.

Another interesting product is FaxBack , which allows you to retrieve
of any web page from a fax machine.

Thanks to Neal McBurnett for his assistance with this section.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I SAVE AN INLINE IMAGE TO DISK?

Here are three ways:

1. If you are using Netscape, just hold down the right mouse button
(hold down the single mouse button for more than a second if using the
Mac version) over the image. A menu will appear that includes the
option of saving the image.

2. Turn on "load to local disk" in your browser, if it has such an
option; then reload images. You'll be prompted for filenames instead
of seeing them on the screen. Be sure to shut it off when you're done
with it.

3. Choose "view source" and browse through the HTML source; find the
URL for the inline image of interest to you; copy and paste it into
the "Open URL" window. This should load it into your image viewer
instead, where you can save it and otherwise muck about with it.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DO I SEND NEWSGROUP POSTS IN HTML TO MY WEB CLIENT?

How to do this depends greatly on your system; if you have a Mac or
Windows system, the answer is completely different. But, as food for
thought, here is a simple shell script I use on my Unix account to
send posts from rn and related newsreaders to Lynx. Put this text in
the file "readwebpost" and use the "chmod" command to make it
executable, then put it somewhere in your path (such as your personal
bin directory):

#!/bin/sh
echo \<PRE\> > .article.html
cat >> .article.html
echo \</PRE\> >> .article.html
lynx .article.html < /dev/tty
rm .article.html

Then add the following line to your .rnmac file (create it if you
don't already have one):

W |readwebpost %C

Now, when you press "W" while reading a post in rn, a message will be
sent to Lynx, and the links enclosed in it will be live.

Larry W. Virden provides the following version which invokes Mosaic
instead, and is also capable of communicating with an already-running
copy of Mosaic instead of launching another. (You can use the same rn
macro as above, invoking "goto-xm" instead of "readwebpost".) Read the
comments for details on the assumptions made by the script.

#! /bin/sh
# goto-xm, by Joseph T. Buck <jbuck@eecs.berkeley.edu>
# Modified heavily by Larry W. Virden <lvirden@cas.org>
# Script for use with newsreaders such as trn. Piping the article
# through this command causes xmosaic to pop up, pointing to the
# article. If an existing xmosaic (version 1.1 or later) exists,
# the USR1 method will be used to cause it to point to the correct
# article, otherwise a new one will be started.

# assumptions: ps command works as is on SunOS 4.1.x, may need changes
# on other platforms.

URL=`/bin/grep '^Message-ID:' | /bin/sed -e 's/.*</news:/' -e 's/>.*//'`
if [ "X$URL" = "X" ]; then
echo "USAGE: $0 [goto] [once] < USENET_msg" >&2
exit 1
fi

pid=`ps -xc | egrep '[Mm]osaic' | awk 'NR == 1 {print $1}'`
p=`which Mosaic`
gfile=/tmp/Mosaic.$pid

$p "$URL" &

if [ "$#" -gt 0 ] ; then
if [ "$1" = "goto" -o "$1" = "same" ] ; then
shift
echo "goto" > $gfile
else
echo "newwin" > $gfile
fi
else
echo "newwin" > $gfile
fi
/bin/awk 'END { printf "'"$URL"'" }' </dev/null >> $gfile

trap "echo signal encountered" 30
kill -USR1 $pid

exit 0

See also MosaicMail (URL is
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.doc.html ), a Perl script
which pipes email and/or news to your current Mosaic session.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I GET SOUND FROM THE PC SPEAKER WITH WINMOSAIC?

This piece of wisdom donated by Hunter Monroe:

This section explains how to install sound on a PC which already has a
working version of Mosaic for Microsoft Windows. Be warned in advance
that the results may be poor.

To get Mosaic to produce sound out of the PC speaker, first, you need
a driver for the speaker. You can get the Microsoft speaker driver
from the URL ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/SPEAK.EXE or by
doing an Archie search to find it somewhere else. SPEAK.EXE is a
self-extracting file. Copy the speak.exe file to a new directory, and
then type "SPEAK" at the DOS prompt. Do not put the file SPEAKER.DRV
in a separate directory from OEMSETUP.INF.

Now, you need to install the driver. In Windows, from the Program
Manager choose successively Main/Control Panel/Drivers/Add/Unlisted or
updated drivers/(enter path of SPEAK.EXE)/PC Speaker. At this point
some strange sounds come out as the driver is initialized. Change the
settings to improve the sound quality on the various sounds: tada,
chimes, etc. Click OK when you are finished and choose the Restart
windows option.

Having installed the speaker driver, you will now get sounds whenever
you start Windows, make a mistake, or exit Windows. If you do not want
this, from the Main/Control Panel/Sounds menu, make sure there is no X
next to "Enable System Sounds."

Now, you need a sound viewer program that Mosaic can call to display
sounds. NCSA unfortunately recommend WHAM, which does not work well
with a PC speaker. Get the program WPLANY instead. You can find a copy
nearby with an Archie search on the string "wplny"; the current
version is WPLNY09B.ZIP. For details on archie and other basic issues
related to FTP, please read the Usenet newsgroup
news.announce.newusers.

Move the zip file to a new directory, and use an unzip program like
pkunzip to unzip it, producing the files WPLANY.EXE and WPLANY.DOC.
Then edit the MOSAIC.INI file to remove the "REM" before the line
"TYPE9=audio/basic". Then, you need lines in the section below that
read something like: audio/basic="c:\wplany\wplany.exe %ls"
audio/wav="c:\wplany\wplany.exe %ls" where you have filled in the
correct path for wplany.exe. The MOSAIC.INI file delivered with Mosaic
may have NOTEPAD.EXE on the audio/basic line, but this will not work.
Now, restart Mosaic, and you should now be able to produce sounds. To
check this, with Mosaic choose File/Local File/\WINDOWS\*.WAV and then
try to play TADA.WAV. Then, you might try the Mosaic Demo document for
some .AU sounds, but you are lucky if your speaker produces something
you can understand.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

AMIGA SERVERS

AWS
AWS is the first server written specifically for the Amiga.
Documentation is available from <URL:http://www.phone.net/aws/>
, and the distribution can be downloaded by anonymous FTP from
<URL:ftp://max.physics.sunysb.edu/pub/amiga/amosaic/> .

NCSA
NCSA's Unix server has been ported to the Amiga, and is bundled
with the AMosaic browser; however, a web page about the port is
no longer available.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MACINTOSH SERVERS

WebSTAR
WebSTAR is an "industrial-strength" commercial World Wide Web
server from StarNine, Inc. (URL is
<URL:http://www.starnine.com/> ).

MacHTTP
MacHTTP <URL:http://www.starnine.com/machttp/machttpsoft.html>
is a freely available web server for the Macintosh. There is
also a Frequently Asked Questions posting dedicated to MacHTTP:
<URL:http://arpp1.carleton.ca/machttp/doc/>

Mac Common Lisp Server
A server written in Mac Common Lisp (URL is
<URL:http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/cl-http/home-page.
html> ) is now available. The Mac Common Lisp server supports
extension of the server with object-oriented Lisp code and is
freely available, including source.

http4mac
http4mac is a simple, free web server for the Macintosh.
<URL:http://130.246.18.52/>

NetPresenz
NetPresenz is a very inexpensive package for the Macintosh that
is capable of serving three protocols: FTP, HTTP, and gopher.
CGI programming and other new features have been added
recently. Formerly known as FTPd.
<URL:http://www.share.com/peterlewis/>

InterServer Publisher
<URL:http://www.intercon.com/newpi/InterServerP.html>, is a
commercial web, FTP, and gopher server for the Macintosh. It
emphasizes ease of configuration but also supports
configuration through AppleScript. The server also offers a
server-side HTML extension which supports hit counters, image
maps, and directory listings as standard features. A 30-day
demo is available by anonymous ftp from ftp.intercon.com in the
/intercon/sales/Mac/Demo_Software/ directory.

Common Lisp Hypermedia Server (CL-HTTP)
The CL-HTTP server
<URL:http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/cl-http/server.htm
l> is a web server written entirely in Common Lisp. It is
available on many platforms, and can be programmed at a
remarkably high level, using Lisp code to generate much of the
output of the server. An interesting option when development
time is limited.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MSDOS AND NOVELL NETWARE SERVERS

NetWare Web Server
The NetWare Web Server, from Novell, offers a way to turn any
NetWare server into a World Wide Web server. Support for a
NetWare-style variation of CGI called R-CGI and for the
execution of scripts on remote Unix machines distinguish this
server. See Novell's home page for more information.
<URL:http://www.novell.com/>

KA9Q
KA9Q NOS (nos11c.exe) is a internet server package for DOS that
includes HTTP and Gopher servers. It is a useful way to turn
even an older machine into a useful Internet appliance. It can
be obtained via anonymous FTP from one of the following sites:

inorganic5.chem.ufl.edu
biochemistry.cwru.edu

GLACI-HTTPD
GLACI-HTTPD is a Netware Loadable Module which allows a Novell
NetWare server to become a World Wide Web server (URL is
http://www.glaci.com/info/glaci-httpd.html ).

WonLoo Telenologies NLM
WonLoo Telenologies also offers a Netware Loadable Module which
permits a Novell Netware server to act as a web server.
<URL:http://www.wonloo.com/>

The Major BBS
Galacticomm's Major BBS software now has an Internet
Connectivity Option that adds web server capabilities (URL is
<URL:http://www.gcomm.com/> ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

UNIX SERVERS

NCSA httpd
NCSA is the source of one of the oldest Unix web servers, and
still one of the best, known as the NCSA httpd; it is available
at the URL ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd. Versions 1.5 and
later support HTTP Keep-Alive, which improves efficiency when
the server is communicating with a compatible web browser such
as Microsoft Internet Explorer. More information is available
at NCSA <URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/>.

XS-HTTPD
XS-HTTPD is a small, fast, back-to-basics web server. XS-HTTPD
supports CGI and other standard features, executes a user's CGI
programs under that user's own ID, and preforks a fixed number
of copies of itself for performance (like most other fast
servers). <URL:http://www.stack.urc.tue.nl/~sven/xs-httpd/>

Apache httpd
Apache is a powerful, reliable drop-in replacement for the NCSA
httpd. <URL:http://www.apache.org/apache/> Note that a version
which supports SSL for secure transactions is also available.
<URL:http://www.algroup.co.uk/Apache-SSL>

w3 httpd
The w3 consortium httpd, originally developed at CERN, is
available for anonymous FTP from ftp.w3.org (URL is
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Status.html ) and many
other places. The w3 server is currently the only free server
able to act as a caching proxy.

Spyglass httpd
Spyglass offers a Unix web server, free of charge. The server
claims higher speeds than other commercial and free servers and
offers benchmark tests to back them up. CGI, authentication, a
faster non-CGI programming interface and other common server
features are included.
<URL:http://www.spyglass.com/products/server_download.html>

Netscape's Netsite Servers
Netscape Communications Corporation offers two server products,
high-end Netscape Commerce Server (capable of secure
transactions) and the less expensive Netscape Communications
Server. Both products feature a more efficient replacement for
CGI (common gateway interface) programming and are designed to
be more efficient than traditional free-of-charge servers such
as the NCSA and CERN http demons.

Compuserve Internet Office Web Server
Compuserve's Internet division (formerly Spry) offers the
Internet Office Web Server, available for both Unix and
Windows NT. The standard edition can be tried out for free. The
professional edition includes editing tools and supports S-HTTP
security and SQL database connectivity.

GN Gopher/HTTP server
The GN server is unique in that it can serve both WWW and
Gopher clients (in their native modes). This is a good server
for those migrating from Gopher to WWW, and includes some of
the more powerful web server features as well (such as CGI
scripts). See the URL http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/.

Perl server
There is also a server written in the Perl scripting language,
called Plexus, for which documentation is available at the URL
http://bsdi.com/server/doc/plexus.html .

WN Server
The WN Server, available at the URL
http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/docs/manual.html , is designed with an
emphasis on security and flexibility, and takes a different
approach from the NCSA and CERN servers. It provides text
searching facilities as a standard feature.

EIT httpd
EIT has created the Webmaster's Starter Kit, which installs
their WWW server on your system via the web through a painless
forms interface. Recommended for those unfamiliar with server
installation. You can learn more about the starter kit and the
EIT httpd at the starter kit site (URL is
http://wsk.eit.com/wsk/doc/ ).

Phttpd
The Phttpd Server, available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.lysator.liu.se in the directory pub/phttpd, is a
multithreaded server for Sun's Solaris 2.X operating system
which takes advantage of memory mapping and dynamic linking to
achieve excellent performance.

Open Market Web Servers
Open Market offers two commercial products, WebServer and the
Secure WebServer. The latter supports the Secure HTTP and SSL
standards for secure transactions. Both are multithreaded for
efficiency and emphasize strong logging features and access
control (URL is <URL:http://www.openmarket.com> ).

Spinner
Spinner is a free web server for Unix platforms which supports
extensive server-side parsing of documents, completely avoids
forking for non-CGI accesses, and supports multiple roots for
multiple host names (URL is <URL:http://spinner.infovav.se/> ).

Navisoft Server
The Navisoft Server is available for Windows NT, as well as
many Unix platforms, and interfaces directly to a back-end
database for powerful search capabilities.
<URL:http://www.navisoft.com/index.htm>

Boa
Boa is a single-process server. While it does not have every
advanced feature, it is interesting because it internally
multiplexes all of the ongoing http connections and forks only
to handle CGI programs. This should translate into remarkable
speed when serving normal documents. See
<URL:http://www.cerf.net/~paulp/boa/> for more information.

thttpd
thttpd, the "tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server", is much like
Boa in that it takes a single-process approach. thttpd handles
only the GET and HEAD methods and emphasizes simplicity and
very low resource consumption. It isn't suitable for
everything, but it serves simple documents very quickly! It
also has a feature which is currently unique: thttpd can limit
the pace of accesses to particular URLs.
<URL:http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

VM/CMS SERVERS

Webshare
A VM/CMS web server is available from

Beyond Software Incorporated. It was written entirely in REXX and
supports CGI programming in that language as well as more traditional
web server features. Imagemaps are limited to rectangular regions.
<URL:http://www.beyond-software.com/Software/Webshare.html>

VM:Webserver
Sterling Software, Inc. also offers a VM/CMS based web server. CGI and
other web server standards are supported. Web browser-based setup and
maintenance features are included.
<URL:http://www.vmd.sterling.com/general/products/viwindex.html>
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

VMS SERVERS

CERN HTTP for VMS
A port of the CERN server to VMS. Available at the URL
http://delonline.cern.ch/disk$user/duns/doc/vms/distribution.ht
ml .

Region 6 Threaded HTTP Server
A native VMS server which uses DECthreads(tm). This is a
potentially major performance advantage because VMS has a high
overhead for each process, which is a problem for the
frequently-forking NCSA and CERN servers that began life under
Unix. A multithreaded server avoids this overhead. Available at
the URL http://kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu/www/doc/serverinfo.html
.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

IBM OS/2 WEB SERVERS

While OS/2 can take advantage of most Windows software, native OS/2
web servers perform better in the OS/2 environment.

In addition to consulting the list of servers below, be sure to check
out Don Meyer's excellent HTTPD for OS/2 page
<URL:http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu/DLM/HTTPDforOS2.html>, which provided much
of the information for the latest update of this section.

goserve for OS/2
goserve (URL is <URL:http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/goserve/> ) is
a one-piece World Wide Web and Gopher for OS/2. Designed for
ease of installation.

OS2HTTPD
An OS/2 server based on NCSA's Unix HTTPD, ported by Frankie
Fan. See the home page (URL is
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/kf/kfan/overview.html ) for details,
or fetch the package by anonymous FTP from ftp.netcom.com in
the directory pub/kf/kfan.

IBM Internet Connection Server for OS/2
The IBM Internet Connection Server is a commercial product, and
requires the High Performance File System (HPFS).
<URL:http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/ics/icsover.html#servers>

OS2WWW
OS2WWW is a shareware server for OS/2. OS2WWW, like OS2HTTPD,
is a port of the NCSA Unix HTTPD. However, OS2WWW has been
rewritten to take advantage of OS/2 "threads" instead of
creating a new process for every new connection, and
performance should be better than that of OS2WWW.
<URL:http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu/DLM/HTTPDforOS2.shtml#OS2WWW>

Apache for OS/2
A port of the popular freeware Apache server for Unix, Apache
for OS/2 offers many of the same features.
<URL:http://www.slink.com/ApacheOS2/>

W3 HTTPD with Proxy Support
An OS/2 port of the W3 Consortium HTTPD server (originally
developed by CERN) is now available for OS/2. This is currently
the only OS/2 server capable to serve as a proxy.
<URL:http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu/DLM/HTTPDforOS2.shtml#CERN>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MS WINDOWS NT AND WINDOWS 95 SERVERS

Note: ALL the servers on this list are 32-bit servers and are
incompatible with or not recommended for use with 16-bit Windows 3.1.
Servers compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and earlier are covered
in a separate list. Many 32-bit servers in this list are compatible
with Windows 95 as well as Windows NT.

Microsoft Internet Information Server
<URL:http://www.microsoft.com/infoserv/> Microsoft's Internet
Information Server is a free offering for Windows NT. This
server supports both CGI and Microsoft's DLL-based interface,
although storing state information about the user using the
cookie mechanism is not fully implemented for CGI. A detailed
FAQ by Stephen Genusa
<URL:http://rampages.onramp.net/~steveg/iis.html> is available.

WebQuest 95 and NT
The WebQuest servers, from Questar, offer extended server side
include capabilities, easy graphical installation and a bundled
HTML editor. <URL:http://www.questar.com>

SuperWeb Server
The SuperWeb server, from Frontier Technologies, is a
straightforward NT web server which includes HTML and imagemap
editing software. SuperWeb features remote administration
capabilities. <URL:http://www.frontiertech.com>

HTTPS (Windows NT)
HTTPS is a server for Windows NT systems, both Intel and Alpha
-- based. It is available via anonymous FTP from emwac.ed.ac.uk
in the directory pub/https (URL is
ftp://emwac.ed.ac.uk/pub/https). (Be sure to download the
version appropriate to your processor.) You can read a detailed
announcement at the FTP site, or by using the URL
ftp://emwac.ed.ac.uk/pub/https/https.txt.

A professional version is also available (URL is
http://emwac.ed.ac.uk/html/internet_toolchest/https/prof.htm ).

Purveyor
From Process Software Corporation. For Windows NT. Based on the
EMWAC source code, with enhancements (URL is
<URL:http://www.process.com> ).

SerWeb for Windows NT
A simple, effective server for Windows NT, written by Gustavo
Available by anonymous FTP from emwac.ed.ac.uk as
/pub/serweb/serweb_i.zip.

Alibaba
Alibaba is Computer Software Manufaktur's NT-based web server,
which takes advantage of multithreading for best performance:
<URL:http://www.csm.co.at/csm/alibaba.htm>

WebSite
WebSite (URL is <URL:http://website.ora.com/> ) is a Windows
NT-based web server available from O'Reilly. WebSite offers a
graphical, user-friendly front end to the server for easy file
manipulation, and includes software to track down broken links.
WebSite also runs under Windows 95.

FolkWeb WWW Server
FolkWeb is a Windows NT and 95 web server which takes advantage
of threads and offers friendly GUI-based configuration.
<URL:http://www.ilar.com/folkweb.htm>

Commerce Builder
Commerce Builder is a commercial Windows 95 and NT server.
<URL:http://www.aristosoft.com/ifact/inet.htm>

Cyber Presence
The CyberPresence Server, available for Windows NT and Windows
95, emphasizes performance issues. The server offers built-in
imagemap support and high-performance file access as well as
fast DLL-based CGI suport to avoid the overhead of "forking"
processes. <URL:http://www.cyberpi.com/>

SIAC HTTPD
The SIAC web server for NT (currently free software) offers
basic server functionality in addition to a certain amount of
in-page programmability. <&RL:http://wwwserver.itl.saic.com/>

Web Commander
The Web Commander web server for NT and Windows 95 is a
commercial product which emphasizes ease of use, remote
monitoring, and built-in access statistics.
<URL:http://www.flicks.com/1webserv.htm>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

MS WINDOWS 3.1 COMPATIBLE SERVERS

Note: IBM OS/2 servers are now covered under a separate heading.
Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 95-specific servers are also covered
under a separate heading. The servers in this list should work under
the above operating systems, but there are better 32-bit products
available; see the separate listings.

ZBServer
zbserver is a shareware server for Windows which supports both
http and gopher access (URL is
<URL:http://www.utm.edu/~bbradley/zbs/zbs.html> ).

Purveyor
From Process Software Corporation. For Windows NT. Based on the
EMWAC source code, with enhancements (URL is
<URL:http://www.process.com> ).

Windows httpd
WinHTTPD (URL is <URL:http://www.city.net/win-httpd/> ) has
most of the features of the original NCSA Unix server,
including CGI programs (which generate pages on the fly based
on user input). CGI programs implemented in Visual BASIC; they
can also be implemented in Perl or any other language available
for MSDOS. WinHTTPD originated the WinCGI standard now
supported by many Windows servers. CGI DOS programs can be
conveniently debugged using the CGI-DOS Perl library (URL is
<URL:http://infoweb.magi.com/~john/cgi-dos/> ).

SerWeb
A simple, effective server for Windows writtten by Gustavo
Estrella. Available by anonymous ftp from
winftp.cica.indiana.edu (or one of its mirror sites, such as
nic.switch.ch), as the file serweb03.zip, in the directory
/pub/pc/win3/winsock.

Chameleon Web Personal Server
Included with the Chameleon TCP/IP software from Netmanage,
Inc. Comments, anyone?

WEB4HAM
Another Windows-based server, available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de as /pub/net/winsock/web4ham.zip.

Alibaba
Alibaba is Computer Software Manufaktur's NT-based web server,
which takes advantage of multithreading for best performance:
<URL:http://www.csm.co.at/csm/alibaba.htm>

WebServer
The WebServer product from Quarterdeck is a straightforward
Windows 3.1 web server designed to be easy to configure.
<URL:http://www.qdeck.com>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

SERVERS FOR EMBEDDED APPLICATIONS

Companies interested in integrating web server capabilities into an
embedded system on any operating system may be interested in the
Fusion embedded Web server <URL:http://www.magmainfo.com> from Magma
Information Technologies.

Magma Information Technologies also offers Lava 1.2
<URL:http://www.magmainfo.com>, a library for both Windows and MSDOS
which can be linked to your own application to add web-server
capabilities without reinventing the wheel.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN TWO DIFFERENT HOME PAGES SHARE ONE PHYSICAL MACHINE?

Dan Pritchett maintains a document detailing the process of running
two or more servers on the same machine without end users being able
to tell the difference (URL is
<URL:http://www.thesphere.com/~dlp/TwoServers/> ).
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

YEAH, BUT WHICH SERVER IS BEST?

To find out which server is best for your needs, you will want to
consult Paul Hoffman's Server Comparison Chart (URL is
<URL:http://www.proper.com/www/servers-chart.html> ).
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW FAST DOES MY NET CONNECTION NEED TO BE?

The following response to this very-frequently-asked-question was
provided by Mike Meyer (mwm@contessa.phone.net).

The answer is "It depends." What it depends on is what kind of
things you want to provide on your server. Here are some rules of
thumb to use when deciding what kind of connection you need for your
server.

The first rule of thumb is:

_Don't worry about simultaneous access at first._

The first thing to do is make sure you've got enough bandwidth to
send the objects you want to send in a reasonable time. That
provides a lower bound on your line speed no matter what level of
traffic you have.

The second rule of thumb is:

_It should take at most 5 seconds to send a page._

The five second rule dates from command line days, when that was
about how long people would wait before getting impatient with the
system. It seems like a reasonable number to use now.

Since external images/audio/etc. are somewhat exceptional, allow
more time for them. If you think they should have the same
restrictions as above, buy the bandwidth your site will need to do
so. However, the rule of thumb for external images/audio/etc is:

_It should take at most 30 seconds to send an external file._

Given these rules, it's pretty straightforward to work out how large
an HTML page and external files can be. At least, it's easy after
you simplify things by ignoring IP overhead on the line, compression
on modem lines, and anything that's less than 10% of the total (or
even a little bit more than 10%).

The one simplification not to ignore is the multiple packet
round-trips it takes to get data flowing through an HTTP channel.
For modem lines, this is nearly a second for each HTTP connection,
which is significant. For leased lines, it's more like .1 or .2
seconds, which is not significant.

On a 14.4 line assumed to be sending 1.4K bytes of data/second, with
a 1 second startup, you get 4 * 1.4 or 5.6K of HTML. If you want to
include a single inline image, that's 2 seconds of startup, so
you're down to 3 * 1.4 or 4.2K of HTML + image. This means smallish
HTML pages, and simple inline images. For external files, you get 29
* 1.4 or 40K, which is still a small image. If you have a 28.8 line,
you get to double those figures; for a 9600 line, figure 2/3rds of
that size.

On a 56K leased line assumed to be sending 5K/second, you get 25K of
HTML, or mixed HTML/data. For external images, it's 150K. That
should cover any reasonable HTML document, and small to medium
external files. An MPEG movie might be a bit much.

With a T1 line assumed to be sending 150K/second, you get 750K of
HTML, or 4.5 megabytes in an external file. Barring very large
animations, this should be sufficient for anything you want to
serve. More would be faster, but it also gets drastically more
expensive.

Now that you know the minimum bandwidth to deliver a single object
in a timely fashion, let's consider the total throughput of your
site. The maximum throughput is about 118 megaybtes for a 14.4 modem
line, 422 megabytes for a 56K line and 12 gigabytes for a T1 line.

Now look at the total bandwidth you are going to use. Don't forget
that things other than the HTTP server will be using the line, and
some of them may require more bandwidth than the server. If you need
more than 100% of the available bandwidth, you have to buy more
bandwidth. If you need more than 50% of that bandwidth, you should
probably buy more bandwidth. If you need less than 10% of the
bandwidth, you are fine.

To plug in some sample numbers, assume the average size of served
objects is 20K. Rounding to the nearest hundred or thousand in all
cases, we find that you are fine up to 600 access/day on a 14.4
line, and acceptable up to 3,000. For a 56K line, that's 2,300 and
11,500. For a T1, that's 63,000 and 315,000 access/day. If your
document sizes are smaller - which is likely - multiply the numbers
by the appropriate factor.

As a final note, people working well below the 50% limit for a T1
have encountered problems with the server platform. Usually, this is
caused by the HTTP server software encountering some system limit.
If you are working with servers in these ranges, you need to
consider server platform as well.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I MAKE MY WEB SITE SEARCHABLE BY THE USER?

Both free and commercial tools are available for this task. A brief
list of such tools follows. Thanks to John K. Hinsdale for
contributing the original list.

Free Web Site Search Engines

freeWAIS-sf
The well-known freeWAIS-sf engine offers an HTTP front end,
sf-gate, with which users can explore indexed documents on your
site.
<URL:http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/freeWAIS-sf/free
WAIS-sf.html>

glimpse
From the University of Arizona, the glimpse engine can be used
to easily search large numbers of HTML documents.
<URL:http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/index.html>

Harvest
Harvest, from the University of Colorado, is a powerful but
somewhat complex information search and replication system.
Used properly, Harvest can be a powerful tool to distribute
your documents. <URL:http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu>

Commercial Search Engines (Some Available Free)

Excerpt
From Alma Mater Software. An off-the-shelf indexer for SunOS
machines. Includes web-based forms. <URL:http://www.alma.com/>

Excite
From ArchiText, Excite is expressly designed to add
straightforward searching capabilities to existing web sites.
<URL:http://www.excite.com/navigate>

Topic
From Verity, Inc. Topic indexes documents in a high-level
fashion by "concept." <URL:http://www.verity.com/>

WAIS
From America Online, WAIS is a modern commercial verison of the
original WAIS system, one of the first indexing systems of this
type. <URL:http://www.wais.com/>

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DO I CONFIGURE MY SERVER TO RECOGNIZE BOTH .HTM AND .HTML?

Many web servers run Unix or another operating system that allows long
filenames. Many users, on the other hand, are stuck with 8.3 filenames
under MSDOS and Windows 3.1. As a result, many users give their
documents a .htm extension and are surprised when servers fail to
automatically recognize this.

Under the NCSA and Apache web servers for Unix, this can be easily
corrected by adding the following line to the srm.conf file:

AddType text/html .htm

Most servers now ship with both .html and .htm recognized by default.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

DO I HAVE TO APPROVE EVERY IMAGEMAP MY USERS CREATE?

Not if you update to the latest and greatest imagemap software. The
problem is that the NCSA web server imagemap program used to require a
central configuration file. This restriction has been lifted in
version 1.4 of the NCSA web server (read more at
<URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/imagemapping.html> ).

The CERN imagemap program never did have this restriction (consider
<URL:http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/CGI/HTImageDoc.html>
).

Also consider Jutta Degener's "umap" (
<URL:http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/umap.html> ), a flexible
alternative to the standard imagemap utilities.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CAN I SAFELY ALLOW MY USERS TO RUN THEIR OWN CGI SCRIPTS?

CGI scripts are a very powerful facility, with some risks attached to
them. In a Unix system, if CGI scripts run with the same user ID as
the web server itself, poorly or maliciously written scripts can
damage files or open security holes.

There are two important steps that should be taken to correct this:

1. _NEVER_ run your web server as root; make sure it is configured to
change to another user ID at startup time. (This is standard practice
in all web server distributions, but administrators have been known to
change it back to running as root anyway. Don't.)

2. Consider using a wrapper such as
<URL:http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/www/suicide.c>, user.c
<URL:ftp://ftp.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/pub/net/www/tools/cgi-src/> , or
CGIwrap <URL:http://www.umr.edu/~cgiwrap> to ensure that each CGI
script runs with the permissions and user ID of the user responsible
for it.

If proper precautions are taken, user CGI scripts can be reasonably
safe. As always, dumb mistakes that open security holes for outsiders
are more likely to be the cause of problems than actual malice on the
part of your own users.

Also be sure to check out Paul Phillips' excellent collection of CGI
security-related pages
<URL:http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/cgi-security/>.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CAN I BUY SPACE ON AN EXISTING SERVER?

Yes, you can. A list of sites offering WWW space for lease is
available (at the URL
http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/leasing.html ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I KEEP ROBOTS OFF MY SERVER?

Programs that automatically traverse the web can be quite useful, but
have the potential to make a serious mess of things. Every so often
someone will write a "depth-first" searching robot that brings servers
to their knees. See the section on writing robots for details.

Fortunately, most robots on the web follow a simple protocol by which
you can keep them off your server if you wish, or keep them out of
portions of your server which are robot traps (ie, they contain an
infinite number of possible links). Read the document World Wide Web
Robots, Wanderers and Spiders (URL is
<URL:http://web.nexor.co.uk/mak/doc/robots/robots.html> ) and learn
about the emerging standards for exclusion of robots from areas in
which they are not wanted. You can also read about existing robots
there, including useful cataloging robots you probably do _not_ want
to keep off your server.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW DO I PUBLICIZE MY WORK?

There are several things you can do to publicize your new HTML server
or other offering:
* Post to comp.infosystems.www.announce. PLEASE READ THE CHARTER
POSTING FIRST. In general, always read a newsgroup first to
familiarize yourself before posting to it.
* Submit it to Yahoo (URL is <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/> ), an
impressive index of the web which expands its knowledge
automatically but permits the direct submission of URLs as well.
* Submit it to a large number of different catalogs using Submit It
<URL:http://www.submit-it.com/>, a service which allows you to
register with many indexes by filling out a single form.
* A similar one-step submission service is entitled wURLd Presence
<URL:http://www.ogi.com/wurld/>.
* Submit it to the NCSA What's New Page at the URL
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html
(see the page for details on how to submit your listing!).
* Register your URL in the Lycos Database (URL is
<URL:http://www.lycos.com/> ).
* Submit your URL to the maintainers of various catalogs, such as
the WWW Virtual Library (at the URL
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html )
and the ALIWEB index (at the URL
http://web.nexor.co.uk/aliweb/doc/aliweb.html ).
* Read Gareth Rees' guide to publishing on the World Wide Web. (URL
is http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/publish.html ).
* Consult Pete Page's How to Announce your New Web Site (URL is
<URL:http://ep.com/faq/webannounce.html> ).

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I RESTRICT AND CONTROL ACCESS TO MY SERVER?

All major servers have features that allow you to limit access to
particular sites, and many clients have authentication features that
allow you to identify specific users. An overview of this topic
available from the w3 Organization web server (URL is
<URL:http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/AccessAuthorization/Overview.html
> ). There is also a tutorial on security and user authentication with
the NCSA server and Mosaic available, written by Marc Andreessen (URL
is <URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/user.html> ). See
your server documentation for further information.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

CAN I HIDE THE HTML OF MY PAGE SO NO ONE CAN STUDY IT?

No.

For better or worse, the answer is no. When the document is displayed,
the HTML source is there, too; most browsers even have functions like
"View Source" and "Save As HTML."

HTML is not particularly complicated; it is essentially a simple
markup language, and it is unlikely that any HTML "trick" will remain
secret for long. Because HTML is simple, this would probably be the
case even if the source were not visible.

Good HTML _style_, on the other hand, is a subtle thing and requires a
high degree of consistency and editorial sense (not always displayed
in this document, I'll admit). It is unlikely that anyone will succeed
in stealing your "style" using the "View Source" button, although they
may pick up a few tricks.
_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I KEEP STATISTICS ABOUT MY WEB SERVER?

There are several tools which can generate statistics about your web
server.

Wusage
Wusage, written by the author of the FAQ, offers configurable
reports on the popularity of your documents, the sites that
visit you, the peak hours of access to your site, and more.
Sites and documents can be specifically ignored or allowed in
the reports. Reports are generated in HTML with tables
(optional) and full-color inline graphs. Version 4.0 is not
free, but is available at one third of the regular price to
educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. Available
for over 15 Unix platforms, plus DOS, OS/2, and Windows 95 and
NT. See the Wusage home page (URL is
http://www.boutell.com/wusage/ ) for more information, or
obtain Wusage by anonymous FTP from ftp.boutell.com in the
directory pub/boutell/wusage.

net.Analysis
The net.Analysis package offers a real-time look at the
activity on your web server. Analysis is performed on your
local PC and the package can interact with Excel and other
tools. <URL:http://www.netgen.com/>

WebTrends
WebTrends is a server log analysis package for the Microsoft
Windows platform. Although it runs under Windows, WebTrends can
analyze logs generated by any web server that outputs one of
the well-known log formats.
<URL:http://www.egsoftware.com/webtrend.htm>

Combined Log Handling System
The Combined Log Handling System is a log analyzer written in
Perl which is able to read the logs of many different server
packages, including ftp, gopher, several web server flavors,
archie, and others. The system converts log entries to a single
format and providing summary data (URL is
<URL:http://www.hensa.ac.uk/tools/www/logtools/> ).

MK-Stats
MK-Stats produces impressive server statistics reports in HTML,
including high-gloss inline image graphs. MK-Stats analyzes all
server logs, including the referer log (the log of pages from
which your site was accessed) and the error log. Written in
Perl. Shareware.
<URL:http://web.sau.edu/~mkruse/mkstats/index.html>

getstats
getstats is a versatile log analyzer, written in C, which
provides reports for various time periods with a high degree of
flexibility. Add-on packages have been written to generate
reports in HTML and also to generate graphs. You can access the
getstats home page for more information (URL is
http://www.eit.com/software/getstats/getstats.html ), or
obtain the package by anonymous FTP from ftp.eit.com in the
directory /pub/web.software/getstats.

WebStat
WebStat is a package written in the language Python which
supplies statistics on usage by domain, country, etc., with
daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports available. You will
need Python in order to use it. See the WebStat home page (URL
is
http://www.pegasus.esprit.ec.org/people/sijben/statistics/adve
rtisment.html ) for details, or obtain Python from ftp.cwi.nl
in the directory /pub/python and WebStat from
ftp.pegasus.esprit.ec.org in the directory /pub/misc.

WOA
WOA is a server access counter program which counts document
accesses and also provides information about the sites which
accessed each document. WOA generates HTML output and is
written in Tcl and C.
<URL:http://www.lbl.gov/~sls/woa/woa.html>

wwwstat
wwwstat is a full-featured log analyzer written in the language
Perl. (See the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.misc for more
information about the language.) See the wwwstat home page (URL
is http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/wwwstat/) for more
information, or obtain the package by anonymous FTP from
liege.ics.uci.edu in the directory /pub/arcadia/wwwstat. See
also gwstat (URL is http://dis.cs.umass.edu/stats/gwstat.html
), a package which produces GIF graphs from the output of
wwwstat.

bert
Bert is an acronym for Browser-log Extraction and Reporting
Tool. It takes the agent_log and gives information about which
browsers people have been using to access your site with. You
can access the bert home page for more information (URL is
<URL:http://onyx.slu.edu/dylan/bert.html> ).

Quickstats
Quickstats is a straightforward log analysis package, oriented
toward simple queries such as the popularity of a particular
page. Quickstats can also ignore specific sites, among other
options. Check out the QuickStats home page:
<URL:http://spwww.mcit.med.umich.edu/~jauderho/scripts/quicksta
ts.html>

ErrorChk
Unlike most log statistics programs, ErrorChk analyzes and
reports on the contents of the error log created by the NCSA
server. This is useful as a means of diagnosing server
problems. (URL is <URL:
http://coney.gsfc.nasa.gov/Syeds/software/errorchk.html> )

Snowhare's Log Analysis Tools
Snowhare (Benjamin Franz) has made a suite of log analysis
tools written in Perl available at
<URL:http://www.netimages.com/~snowhare/utilities/> which
include graphical reports.

analog
Analog is a server log analysis package which emphasizes
simplicity of installation, speed and attractive results. See
<URL:http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/> for more
information.

_________________________________________________________________

_World Wide Web FAQ_

HOW CAN I SERVE [WORD DOCUMENTS, EXCEL SPREADSHEETS, DOUGHNUTS]?

In order to deliver documents of new and different types from your
server, you need to configure the correct "content type" for each type
of document, and use the proper extension when naming the file on the
server. If the document type is highly unusual, you will also need to
see to it that users know what content type to configure their
browsers for, and what application to launch for that content type.

Presented below is a list of the better-known content types with
commentary on those the author is familiar with. This information is
drawn from appendix 2 of the author's book, CGI Programming in C and
Perl <URL:http://www.boutell.com/cgibook/>. The original list of
content types was taken from the public domain NCSA web server
<URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/>.

Please note: new media types are coming into existence regularly. The
official registry is often well behind actual practice. This list is
based on that included with NCSA's public domain web server as of
September 1995.

No attempt is made here to document the format of the data associated
with these mime types. This list is intended to make it easier to
determine what content type should be assigned to documents produced
by various well-known applications.

Media Content Type Comments

application/activemessage
application/andrew-inset
application/applefile
application/atomicmail
application/dca-rft
application/dec-dx
application/mac-binhex40
application/macwriteii MacWrite Document
application/msword Microsoft Word Document
application/news-message-id
application/news-transmission
application/octet-stream Use for binary file downloads
application/oda
application/pdf Adobe Acrobat Documents
application/postscript Postscript
application/remote-printing
application/rtf Rich Text Format
application/slate
application/x-mif
application/wita
application/wordperfect5.1 WordPerfect 5.1 Documents
application/wordperfect6.0 WordPerfect 6.0 Documents
application/x-csh Potentially dangerous [1]
application/x-dvi TeX/LaTeX Output (not TeX source)
application/x-hdf
applicat