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Toronto, Ontario
For a variety of reasons many clinicians are interested in producing medical Web pages. Some want to make information readily available for their patients, such as instructions for outpatients awaiting surgery, or information about how to get to the hospital. Other individuals want to make copies of their talks widely available through self-publication. Still others wish to provide medical education resources to their students via the Web.
Regardless of the material to be made available by publication on the Web, it is helpful to distinguish between two kinds of Web pages: "content-focused" Web pages and "form-focused" Web pages. With the former, the emphasis is simply on making text materials available without particular attention to the esthetics and layout of the material, while the latter type of Web pages go beyond mere textual content to emphasize layout and formatting, the use of colour and graphics, and even issues such as interactivity with the user. Another (simplistic) way of looking at this is that "content-focused" Web pages emphasize substance while "form-focused" Web pages emphasize style.
Examples of content-focused Web pages are simple pages consisting of pure text only, such as an essay or novel made available online without any special attention to formatting and without the use of hyperlinks, graphics or colour. (Some of the material offered by Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) is like this).
For examples of form-focused Web pages, one need only visit the home page of any major corporation, where the enormous complexity of the Web page is immediately evident upon visual inspection, and is even more evident when the source code of the page is examined. (To examine the HTML source code behind any Web page, simply select the "View Source" option in your Web browser, located in the View menu. You’ll then be able to examine the HTML code making up the document.)
Not surprisingly, content-focused Web pages are more complex, richer and more difficult to construct. But many situations do not require such elaborate Web pages. For a great many applications, a simple content-focused Web page will suffice. This article will provide some hints about developing such a Web page with a minimum of hassle.
The easiest way to proceed is to start with a completed document in Microsoft Word and simply upload the file "as is" to your Web site's root directory using an FTP (file transfer protocol) program (such as "WS_FTP LE", available by free download at http://www.ipswitch.com/Support/ws_ftp_le_support.html.)
For instance, suppose that your great novel that you want to share with the world is in a single file in the root directory called myfirstnovel.doc and further suppose that your Web address (URL, Universal Resource Locator) is www.iwritegreatnovels.com (this URL was still available at the time of writing). Then the URL for the information file would be www.iwritegreatnovels.com/myfirstnovel.doc and that is what users would merely have to type into the browser address box to access the posted information.
The one drawback to this particular solution is that while recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer will correctly display the file with its formatting intact, other browsers like Netscape Navigator or Opera will generally not do so, at least not without the bother of installing a "plug-in", a software upgrade usually obtained by download.
An alternate means to post the group information would be to automatically convert the Microsoft Word file (called, say, myfirstnovel.doc) to HTML format (with a new name, say, myfirstnovel.htm). This is almost trivial to do with recent releases of Word (versions 2000 and 2002) but the process suffers from the drawback that the automatic conversion sometimes produces a Web page that is "esthetically awkward" and occasionally produces a page that is simply dreadful. Consequently, postconversion editing by hand (using Microsoft FrontPageTM or other Web page development environment) is frequently necessary to obtain a respectable result.
One alternative idea especially worth considering that is both easy to implement and browser-friendly is to make group documents available in PDF format (PDF = "portable data format") using a program called Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat installs into the Windows operating system as a virtual printer, which can be selected just like a real printer on your computer. The difference is that when a job is printed using the Acrobat virtual printer a new file is generated in PDF format. This means that generating PDF files using Acrobat is as easy as simply selecting a new printer and printing to it. In the case of the scenario discussed earlier, where all information was placed in a Word file called myfirstnovel.doc, the mere act of printing the file to the Acrobat virtual printer will result in a file called myfirstnovel.pdf being generated in the appropriate directory. By uploading this file to the Web site's root directory, the document becomes available in PDF format at URL www.iwritegreatnovels.com/myfirstnovel.pdf. Finally, note that Adobe Acrobat should not be confused with Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free program that is frequently used to display PDF files (but cannot generate or edit them).
It should also be pointed out that using the simple HTML tags discussed in the last issue it is relatively simple to produce simple content-focused Web pages. The Figure
illustrates the idea. Using the Windows Notepad text editor (or any word processor) type in the text in the Figure, and when finished, save your work as a text (.txt) file. Then rename the file from the .txt extension to an .htm extension. Now you have just created a simple Web page that can be viewed by loading the file into your browser. Note that because the file at this stage is local to the machine and not residing on a server on the Internet, it does not have an address or URL but rather, the file is accessed using the "File, Open, Browse" feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer (with a similar method for other browsers).
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