A Geometry Forum workshop handout:

Mosaic and the (World Wide) Web

the short version

Nobody owns the Web. People are responsible for the documents they create and put on the Web from their homes, schools, and workplaces. The Web is beginning to make it possible to implement long-held dreams of a universal database of knowledge.

Mosaic is a client used to access the Web. Mosaic was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and became available to the Internet community in the first half of 1993. It allows viewing of text and images, and facilitates transfer of sound and video. Mosaic can run on Unix-based machines running X-Windows and IBM-compatibles running Windows, and is the browser of choice for Macintosh computers, although a new popular addition for Macs, MacWeb, has recently been released.

What's on the Web?

What are Hypertext and Hypermedia?

Hypermedia is hypertext with links to sounds, images, and/or movies, combining hypertext and multimedia. You will find diagrams, photographs, and, on the Geometry Forum, problems illustrated using The Geometer's Sketchpad. Mosaic for Macintosh will view most files, but for some images, movies, and sounds additional software such as JPEGView (for GIF/JPEG images), GIFConverter (for TIFF images), SimplePlayer (for QuickTime movies), Sparkle (for MPEG movies), SoundMachine (to play sounds), and Stuffit Expander (for BinHexed files) are needed.

To view and manipulate Sketchpad sketches you must have The Geometer's Sketchpad and your version of Mosaic must be configured properly for Sketchpad. (For directions, surf to the Geometry Forum Home Page and click on set Mosaic to view sketches.)

There are two basic instructions for using Mosaic to navigate the Web: click on highlighted text to follow a link, and explore, using the arrows at the top of the page or the pop-up history menu to go back whence you came.

A quick tour follows.

Launching Mosaic, Entering the Web

Navigation and the Icon Bar

• the 'S' with the world at its center flickers while files are being transferred. Status messages appear below it;

• clicking on the arrows will allow you to return to previous documents and then to your current location;

• the downward pointing triangle indicates a pop-up menu with a list of documents between you and your starting point; you can select a document here to go to it directly. The icon house will return you to the Home Page;

• a Search button, dimmed out most of the time, can be used with keywords when querying an index.

A Quick Tour

You may wish to select Network Starting Points, the Internet Resources Meta-Index, the NCSA Demo Page, or the NCSA What's New Page from the Navigate menu item in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Surf and explore! As you find places you'd like to return to in subsequent visits, choose Add This Document from the Hotlist menu item. In subsequent sessions you can go back to items you've added to your hotlist using this drop-down menu. (When you quit Mosaic and are asked if you want to save changes to the Hotlist, click on Save.)

At first you may feel Lost in Cyberspace. Take a while to get a feel for moving around. To go to a specific site for which you know the address, select Open URL from the File menu, and type the address in the Load URL window that appears. For example, you could type

http://mathforum.org

http://mathforum.org/~steve/

Construct Your Own Home Page

One great advantage of the Web is that all the directions you will need for using it, and for constructing your own HTML (hypertext markup language) documents, are easily accessible from within it. You might want to look for pages of instructions, add them to your hotlist, and construct a Home Page that puts them at your fingertips.

First Build a Hotlist

When you have constructed your hotlist, quit Mosaic (choose Quit from the File Menu) and locate the Hotlist2HTML Folder. Double-click on the icon to open it, double-click on the Hotlist2HTML icon inside, then click once on the credits box. A dialog box will open; find and select (highlight) your Hotlist and click on the Open button. In the next dialog box that appears, type a name such as dave's.hotlist.html (if you're not Dave you could choose your own name, but use periods or underscores instead of spaces and be sure to keep the .html extension), and click on the Save button.

Close the Folder window by clicking in the box in the upper lefthand corner.

Setting the Default Home Page

• Launch Mosaic;
• Select Open Local... from the File Menu;
• Use the standard file dialog to locate the file on your hard drive to load at launch time (e.g., dave's.hotlist. html);
• Make sure the URL is displayed; if necessary, select Show URL from the Option Menu;
• Use the mouse to highlight the URL displayed in the URL box;
• Copy the URL (select Copy from the Edit Menu);
• Open the Preferences dialog by selecting Preferences... from the Options Menu; Paste the URL you copied into the Home Page box, replacing the original text;
• Select Apply to save the changes;
• Test by quitting and relaunching Mosaic.