For detailed information on Internet Explorer and alternative browser choices such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, see my Web browsers page under Internet software.
You can usually print reasonably nice-looking paper versions of most Web pages, if the author hasn't been too stubborn about hard-coded formatting. Often when pages are heavily hard-coded, there will be a link provided for a "printer-friendly" version. Of course, there's really no reason all pages can't be printer-friendly, but never mind.
Sometimes you may need to use landscape mode to get something to print in a usable form. Background pattern graphics usually are not printed by default. If you encounter printing problems due to unusual text colors or solid background colors, there are usually options to turn off printing of those colors, to force all text to print black on a white background.
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Here's a browser tip: |
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There normally will also be default headers and footers, that print the page URL, page title, date, and page numbers. You should probably leave those settings alone; all that information is useful. You should be able to change the printed font size, sometimes separately from the display font; sometimes you have to change both with the same option. With some printers and display modes, you may need very different font sizes for display and printing.
Printing a Web page is a good way to hand the URL to someone, along with some idea of what the page is like. Often using the option to print just the first page will work well for that, and save paper besides. If you spend a lot of time away from Web access, you may want to print certain pages to enable you to refer to information on them.
Don't get in the habit of printing pages instead of bookmarking them. Paper takes up space, can get misplaced, and making it kills trees. If you just want to find the page later, bookmark it and move the bookmark into a subject folder, don't print it.
Your Web browser probably installed with some particular start page already set; usually something at microsoft.com or netscape.com, or a page preconfigured by your employer or your hardware vendor. You can reset it to start with any Web page you want, and you probably should. The search page you use the most often is a popular choice; another typical one is your employer's intranet or external Internet page, if they have either. If you use free Web-mail, you may very well want to set your browser to go right to your Web-mail every time you start it.
You can also elect to have your browser start up as a blank window, in Navigator, Opera, Mozilla Firfox, and MSIE 6. You can still designate a personal home page, and jump to it at any time by clicking the Home button. You also can set up some other pages you can get to quickly, by spotting their bookmarks at the top of your bookmarks list, outside of any folders; you can then see them whenever you open the bookmarks menu.
I even saw a report of a study in the 1990's in which a rather startling percentage of a company's total Internet bandwidth was being used up just by everyone's Web browsers loading the Netscape Web page on startup, because no one had changed their default startup page. Most search engine and Web-mail pages are pretty well-optimized for quick loading, and therefore make reasonably efficient use of company bandwidth. Yahoo and Google make good general-purpose start pages; both load fast and are useful.
Jakob Nielsen says on his Alertbox site that based on interface studies, the Back button is the second most used feature in Web browsers (after following hyperlinks). Unfortunately, there's a limit to how many backward steps you can take at any given time. If you've followed enough forward links since you viewed a particular page, you may not be able to return to that page using just the Back button. I remember this being a big source of frustration when I was first learning to use the Web.
Some corporate Web sites always open external links in a new browser window. The new window initially doesn't have a history of previously opened pages, so the Back button will be disabled ("greyed out"). If both the old and new browser windows are full-screen, a novice user may not understand that a new window has opened, or why the Back button suddenly doesn't work. (Which is one good reason why this is bad Web design, by the way.) One way to help you keep track: run your browser windowed rather than full-screen. Then when a new browser window opens without your permission it will be visually obvious; you will see the edges of the old window behind the new one. Of course, if you have a smaller display, you'll probably want to keep your browser window sized to almost full-screen size.
Some Web sites are programmed to break the Back button by forcing the browser to behave as though its history cache is empty. When this happens there will just be the one browser window. The cache isn't really empty, though, and you should still be able to return to earlier pages using your browser's History features. A similar situation can result from pages that redirect you immediately to another page; the Back button just takes you to the redirecting page, which then bounces you right back. You can use History to fix that too.
If you want to make certain you can get back to a particular page later, there are two basic things you can do, probably depending on how much you value that particular page. You can bookmark it, or you can open links in a new browser window (on purpose). There's more on the latter technique on my Advanced browser tips page.
Web sites can send many different kinds of files: pictures, documents, animations, sound and video clips, Acrobat PDF files for printing, and so forth. Some file types your browser can present on its own. For other file types it needs a plugin, a helper program that can display the file.
Your browser keeps a list of foreign file types and what it's supposed to do with them. The interface for it is different in different browsers. For each type, you can specify to automatically launch the appropriate plugin and load the file, or ask the user for directions. For example, when you click on a link and a site sends an Acrobat PDF file, your browser can automatically start Acrobat Reader and display the document (and for PDF files, this is safe).
Some file types can carry computer viruses. In terms of extensions, EXE, COM, DLL, VBS, and MS Office DOC and XLS files can all have viruses, just for starters. The bottom line: unless you are sure that a particular file type can't carry a virus, you shouldn't let your browser launch it automatically. Have the browser prompt you, and then if you really need a particular file, you can save it to disk and scan it with your antivirus software before opening it.
Some people seemed to find the Internet sort of sinister and alarming, for a few years in the late 1990s. It seems like most people are getting past that phase now.
People new to the Internet are sometimes shocked when they find something online that's wrong, stupid, hateful, or smutty. Of course, you can find wrong, stupid, hateful, and smutty stuff on the average magazine/tabloid rack ... or even in the library on occasion. Nobody seems to get very excited about that. If you think of the Internet as a big mirror held up to reflect the rest of human culture, you'll be a lot closer to the truth of things than those folks that keep trying to enact computer censorship laws such as the CDA.*
You can access information on the Internet a lot faster than other media, but information is not more reliable just because you found it on the Internet.
So when some Web site is telling you stuff about astronomy, or medicine, or the stock market, how do you tell if it's good information or bunk? Well, how do you tell when it's in print? You consider the source. You check to see if you're looking at Wall Street Journal or a supermarket tabloid, right?
Do the same thing on the Web. For example, if you're looking for information on upper respiratory disease in children, and the site you're looking at is that of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I'd say you should consider it pretty credible. If it's from some obscure medical school, the page hasn't been updated in two years, and some of it is spelled wrong, you might want to be dubious.
Microsoft created and published a set of free TrueType "Web core fonts" somewhere around 1999. The main thing they have in common is a larger x-height. This refers to the height of a lower-case "x" and other similar letter parts, relative to the basic overall height of the font, as with an upper-case "M". Up to a point, typefaces with bigger x-heights are more readable on a PC display.
The most important typefaces in the set are:
If you have Windows 2000 or Windows XP, you should already have all of these except Andale Mono, but your Web browser default fonts may still be set to Times New Roman and Arial.
In mid-August 2002, Microsoft suddenly removed the links for these Web fonts from their public Web pages. I've seen some speculation that they might have noticed these fonts are useful to the Linux community. The font files are still available from SourceForge and from various other Web archives.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 has a wizard built into it to help you access these fonts: see File, Wizards, "Install fonts from the Web." Once OOo gets the fonts for you, they will also be available in your browser and other applications. For more about the OpenOffice.org free office suite, see my OOo page under about PCs.
| typeface | filename | bytes |
|---|---|---|
| Andale Mono | andale32.exe | 198384 |
| Arial | arial32.exe | 554208 |
| Arial Black | arialb32.exe | 168176 |
| Comic Sans MS | comic32.exe | 246008 |
| Courier New | courie32.exe | 646368 |
| Georgia | georgi32.exe | 392440 |
| Impact | impact32.exe | 173288 |
| Times New Roman | times32.exe | 661728 |
| Trebuchet MS | trebuc32.exe | 357200 |
| Verdana | verdan32.exe | 351992 |
| Webdings | webdin32.exe | 185072 |
These fonts are useful in two ways:
This site's style sheet is mostly coded for Web font as first choice, original Windows font second choice, then the browser default, for each generic font type. My first choices are Georgia serif body text, Verdana and Comic Sans sans-serif for headings and small print, and Lucida Console monospace for code and URLs.
Ordinary non-frames sites are fairly simple. You follow a link or type in a Web address, and the remote server sends you a single HTML document/file, which usually has some pictures attached. The single document is plotted and displayed using the whole browser window, pretty much like reading a single document in a word processor. When you follow another link, you get a new document, which again takes up the whole browser window. Every page in a non-frames site has its own URL address and can be separately bookmarked.
Frames sites are a little more complicated. They divide the browser window into sections called frames, and display separate documents in the frames. Most often, there will be a narrow navigation frame at the left, containing buttons or hyperlinks relating to content sections of the site, which are then displayed in the wider right-side frame. Some sites use more complicated arrangements with three or more frames. This is somewhat similar to viewing two documents in a word processor, or using a split window to view separate parts of one document.
When you follow a link to a frames site, the server sends you a frameset document, and two or more body documents. The frameset defines the layout and behavior of the framed areas of the browser window, and the body documents contain the actual text and graphics to be displayed inside those frames.
Frames by default have their own scroll bars and can be resized; that is, you can scroll a frame's contents (if the document is bigger than the frame on your display) and drag the boundary between two frames to change their relative sizes. Web authors can and often do override those features and turn off scroll bars, resizing, or both. They can even turn off the default frame border; the only way you know you have frames then might be their scroll/refresh behavior.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox page Why Frames Suck (December 1996) is a good exposition of the fundamental usability problems with frames. The Frames section of my Web design page also has a brief list of frames problems. Searching for "frames" inside Yahoo's WWW category will usually turn up more on this subject.
Many site designs still use frames for navigation, and there are complex design approaches available that address at least some of these concerns. On the other hand, there are also several kinds of banners and logos becoming popular, that you can display on your home page to declare your site "frames-free."
There are usually ways in different browsers to override frames sites in various ways. Usually you can choose to print a single frame, view the source code for the contents of a single frame (a body document) view the source code of the site frameset document (usually not very interesting) or display the contents of a frame in a separate unframed browser window. If you don't find what you need in the browser's pull-down menus, try right-clicking the frame of interest and look on the mouse menu.
Internet URL addresses were not originally intended to be remembered or typed in by humans. But as we all know, it turned out that we have to sometimes. So it may help somewhat to have an idea what you're looking at.
Here's an example URL that uses everything:
| http:// protocol ID |
www.foo.net system name |
:8000 port# |
/users/jdoe/ directory path |
bar.html filename |
Real-world URLs usually leave out some of these sections, sometimes all but the system name:
Case is usually ignored in protocol IDs and system names. On Unix systems, names of directories and files are case-sensitive. Map.html and map.html would be treated as two different file names on Unix, and /users and /USERS as different directory names.
http://internic.net/cgi-bin/whois?sourceforge.net
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave+Washington+DC
URLs for Web sites on Unix servers often include a single directory name with a funny-looking squiggle character in front of it, called a tilde. On a standard "101" keyboard it's a shift character at the upper left corner, just above the Tab key. The tilde character tends to confuse folks the first time they encounter it (it's often mistaken for a dash at first). It's just an old Unix shortcut convention, that actually pre-dates the Web.
In Unix pathnames, by convention, the tilde character stands for "user's home directory." It gets interpreted a little differently depending on what Unix process is seeing it. In Web addresses, a URL that looks like www.foo.net/~jdoe (meaning "standard Web-page home directory, on this site, for user jdoe") might get translated to something like http://www.foo.net/home/jdoe/public_html/index.html
So as you can see, that funny-looking tilde character is actually saving you a bunch of typing. Learn to recognize it when you see it, and locate it on your keyboard. It's not that hard.
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