Mathematical Content on the World Wide Web: Getting Beyond "Gee Whiz!"

These pages can be found on the World Wide Web at
http://www.math.csusb.edu/faculty/susan/cmc.html and http://weasel.cnrs.humboldt.edu/~prompt/cmc/

Dave's Web pages: http://weasel.cnrs.humboldt.edu/~dave

Susan's Web pages: http://www.math.csusb.edu/faculty/susan/home.html http://www.math.csusb.edu/faculty/susan/home.html

Navigating the World Wide Web

These pages were written with Netscape in mind, but most of the information should be valid with any web browser: Mosaic, Microsoft Explorer, the AOL browser, etc.

How to get around.

• Links. If you see a phrase that is underlined (and it's usually blue) or a picture that is outlined, you can click (once) on it to go to the site it refers to. Sometimes a picture will have different places you can click to go to different places. If your cursor is in a clickable location, it will change shape.
• Bookmarks. If you found a site you would like to return to, add a bookmark (also called a Hot Link) using the Bookmark menu. From this menu you can also go to any of the bookmarks you have saved.
• Buttons: Forward, Back, Home. Home is the page that you first see when you start Netscape. If you have visited several sites, Back will take you to the previous site. Once you've been Back, you can retrace your steps with Forward.
• URLs (Open Location). An URL (Universal Resource Locator) is a World Wide Web address. If you know the URL of a location you can type it in a window you get by
• choosing Open Location on the File menu or
• typing in the Location window.

Beware! Typos are not tolerated! Better to cut and paste ifolerated! Better to cut and paste if you have it somewhere else on your screen.
Here's a typical URL:

http://www.math.csusb.edu/mathed/certificate.html

• Searching. The Internet has a number of sites that run search engines: programs that search the whole World Wide Web for topics. If you click the Net Search button in Nestcape, you will get a list of about 20 of them. Unfortunately, searching is somewhat of an art form: if you just type in a likely topic, you may come up with no "hits" or millions of "hits". Here are some suggestions for searching.
• The sites found are usually arranged in order according to "relevance". This is defined by an algorithm which takes into account the title of the document, how many times the relevant words appear in the document, and several other possibly irrelevant criteria. For instance, a search for Middle School Math Education turned up the Wesleyan University Math Department, since it's in MIDDLEtown, CT.
• Many of the sites allow for Boolean searches: there are ways to use the logical terms "and", "or" and "quot;or" and "not". (For example, you could look for the word "education" and leave out pages with "physical" by a search under "education not physical". The shorthand used for these terms depends on the site; if they allow Boolean searching, there will be a help link with information.

Infoseek	Excite	The Electric Library	AltaVista
IBM infoMarket	Four11	GTE SuperPages	Lycos
Yahoo!	SHAREWARE.COM		HotBot	DisInformation
WhoWhere?	Bigfoot	Magellan	OpenText Index
AccuFind	100hot Web Sites	BigBook	ON'VILLAGE

• Browsing a "search engine" site. Most of these sites also have a browsing facility, where you can look through subjects arranged like an index to find your topic. If you come up with too long a list by the first method, try one of these. Different sites arrange their selections quite differently; you may find that one is hard to use for your subjects, and another has a more convenient organization.

Saving, Downloading, Printing.

• Helper Applications. Web browsers caner Applications. Web browsers can't handle all types of things (some pictures, movies, music, MS Word documents, Geometer's Sketchpad sketches), so allow you to configure it for "helper applications" that handle specific types of files. Files of these types can be saved from the helper application. To configure your browser for specific helpers, look for "Options" and/or "Preferences" on a menu. You can sometimes figure out how to do it from the applications already configured, or get help on the pages where the documents you want are.

• Save as. . . To save a Web page on your computer, choose Save or Save as on the File menu. Among the choices are
• Text: You will get the text from the page, arranged in roughly the same style, but without any fancy fonts. You don't get the links or pictures. But it's easy to print.
• Source: You will get the text and all the formatting code, and all the code for the links and pictures. You don't get the files that are linked to or the pictures. However, if you open this file in your web browser, all the links will still work as long as the were listed with full URLs.
• Downloading software and other big things.
• Macintosh. Macintosh downloads are either in binhex ("packed up"; suffix .hqx) format or binary (ready to run; suffix .bin). To unpack a .hqx file, you need Stuffit, which can be downloaded from the Web; it comes with recent versions of Netscape. Once a file is unbinhexed, it is often a self-extracting archive (suffix .sea). To extract it, double-click on its icon.
• Windows. Windows downloads are either in zipped ("packed up"; suffix .zip) format or binary (ready to run; suffix .exe). To unpack a .zip file, you need a utility like PKZip, which can be downloaded from the Web.
• Printing. If your computer is connected to a printer, you should be able to print the page by clicking the Print button. Printing will include all the formatting and pictures.

Other features.

< parts of the page.

What does http://www.math.csusb.edu/mathed/certificate.hmtl mean?

1. http:// means that this is the address of a World Wide Web site. Well, duh! What else could it be? It could be a gopher site (the hottest Internet navigation tool until the Web was invented), an ftp site (for downloading software and other big things), or several others. HTTP stands for HyperText Transport Protocol, the common conventions that the computers that make up the Web use.
2. www.math.csusb.edu/ may remind you of the part of an e-mail address after the @ sign; if so, you're right. WWW is the name of the Web server (a specific computer) in the Math Department subdomain of California State University's part of the Internet; this is an educational institution. Other suffixes are .com (a commerical site), .gov (a federal, state, or local government agency), and .org (a nonprofit organization). Sites in the U.S. sometimes end with .us instead. Suffixes for some other countries are .au (Australia) and .jp (Japan).
3. mathed/ is a directory (folder) on the Web server.
4. certificate.html is the file (document) for the Web page. It is written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which includes codes for formatting, links, images, etc.