CS 494/594: Information Retrieval - Lab 1

The Internet has grown exponentially in recent years. With the advent of the WWW, the amount of information available on the Internet is increasing rapidly. While WWW allows a browser to display many types of information (postscript documents, MPEG movies, audio, etc.), most of the documents on the web consist of text with interspersed HTML commands that provide formatting (like bolding).

In this lab, you should contribute to the information explosion by creating your own homepage, if you don't already have one. You should begin by reading the Beginner's Guide to URL's and the Beginner's Guide to HTML . Then, you should create a directory called www-home in your home directory and set the permissions on www-home to world readable and executable (chmod ugo+rx ~/www-home should do the trick). You should name your homepage index.html and make it world readable (chmod ugo+r index.html). By naming your homepage index.html and placing it in the directory www-home, you allow the server (called the HTTP server) to retrieve your homepage using the following URL:

While thinking about your homepage, you might want to consult any of the various Guides to Writing HTML Documents. In particular, you might want to read the Bad Style Page, Composing Good HTML, and Elements of HTML Style found on that page.

You may put anything you want on your homepage. However, since we will use HTML tables later in the semester, you should somehow incorporate at least one table into your homepage. Look at Tables as Implemented in Netscape 1.1 for an explanation of HTML tables and HTML Validation Service. This assures that the HTML you create conforms to the official standard and won't cause problems with browsers that don't handle HTML the same way your browser handles it. When you use the validation service, you should set the Level of Conformance to "Mozilla" and provide the full URL to the validator (that is, http://www.cs.utk.edu/~YourUserName/index.html).

Again, be as creative as you want while creating your homepage. Since this is a mostly creative exercise to help you get acquainted with the WWW and HTML, you will only be graded on whether you use a table and whether you have produced valid HTML. In addition, your homepage will be used later to make a searchable index, so you might want to think about what you would want to include on the page to provide interesting searches.

Other resources that might be of interest:

• Homepages of people in the Computer Science department.
• HTML is currently being expanded to make it more useful. Check out the HyperText Markup Language page to find out more about HTML. In particular, HTML is a subset of a more generalized markup language called SGML.
• Oak Ridge National Labs has a number of links to interesting Web and Network Tools.
• To add icons to your page, check out Fuzzy's Icon Directory, Yahoo's Icon Directory, or the Imagebases page. You should use icons in moderation, however. Not only will your page take longer to load from remote sites, but since images tend to be rather large, you will be contributing to the disk space problems in the department. Spacegripe will find you!

As with all labs for this course, you should start early. Remember:

• Mail has been known to to be delayed for hours, days, or weeks. We'll try to reply when you send us the URL to your homepage, but if the deadline has already passed before we receive your email, it might be difficult to prove you had your lab in on time.
• You should make sure your URL works before you send it to us. In other words, verify that the exact URL you want to send us actually works before you actually send it to us.
• Web services are not always available. If you wait until the night before the assignment is due to try to validate your page and the HTML validator isn't working or is unreachable, it will be impossible to fulfill that part of the assignment. Of course, we will be unsympathetic and merciless.

Enough with the nastiness. Have fun!