Configuration of Your System

In this section we give a brief summary of the software that is assumed to be available on the machine of the Tutorial user, and an overview of the Netscape browser helper application and plugin setup that we have assumed in our discussion. This section is intended as a technical aid for anyone setting up machines to use the Tutorial. If your machine has already been configured you may neglect this section.

All Macintoshes on which this Tutorial has been tested run the Mac 7.1 or later operating system. Mac operating systems of earlier vintage are now severely outdated; not all of the software used here will even run under earlier operating systems, and little of it will run as well as under System 7. If your system is not already there, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to System 7 or later.

The browsers and related software that are required to run the Tutorial will generally need at least 8 MB of RAM, and 12 would be preferred, particularly if you use Netscape 3.0. If you do not have 12 MB of ram installed, we suggest that you use the memory control panel to allocate at least 12MB of virtual memory.

Disclaimer

As a corollary to the above disclaimer, we do not view our choice of software as a definitive review of that software relative to other choices that could have been made. Our choices were based on 3 principles:

1. It was necessary to make a choice of particular pieces of software to make the Tutorial concrete and hands-on: our purpose was not to evaluate software in any broad sense, but to provide specific working examples of Web techniques that K-12 teachers can use in their classrooms.

2. We used software that we knew from our own experience would perform the necessary task in a satisfactory manner; there may be other software that would do as well or better. For the most part, we leave others to address such issues.

3. As far as possible, we have used Freeware and Shareware versions of software in the Tutorial because of limited software budgets for K-12 education. Although in many cases commercial software might do an even better job or have more technical support, we believe that all Freeware and Shareware used here is adequate to the task and sufficiently well documented to be be usable in the K-12 environment.

Some General Listings of Available Resources

• Web Server Resource Guide

• WWW and HTML Tools

Software Used and Cited in the Tutorial

The Tutorial has chosen Netscape 2.0 or 3.0 as the working browser for illustrations. You may use other browsers, but we assume that it supports (1) graphics, (2) forms, (3) frames, (4) tables, (5) background colors and tiling, and (6) Java. This is true of the ones listed above (some versions of Netscape 2.0 support Java poorly, or not at all). If your browser doesn't have these capabilities, get a new one! There is no reason to use a browser with outdated capabilities when newer ones are freely available.

We now list helper and plugin applications used in the Tutorial by the browser. The specific example will be for Netscape 2.02. For Netscape 3.0 the setup is even easier because it comes preconfigured with many helpers and plugins.

For reference, we now list the Netscape 2.0 helper application setup assumed in the Tutorial (set under the "Preferences" menu). If your machine is already configured for Web browser applications, you may have little or nothing to change here. We note again that Netscape 3.0 comes preconfigured with many helpers and plugins that will make this setup even easier in that case.

In addition to Browser and helper software used directly by the Browser, the Tutorial uses directly in at least one place the Freeware and Shareware found in the following table.

Finally, we list additional software that is not used directly in the Tutorial, but that is cited and discussed. In most cases this represents valuable utility Freeware and Shareware associated with compression, archiving, encoding, and conversion tasks.

Help