November 1996
Web-Site Automation
Automating Web-Site Maintenance, Part 1
By Paul Helinski
Webmasters spend countless hours updating pages and links and performing other time-consuming tasks. In the first installment of this three-part series, Paul presents a set of freely available tools to make your site more efficient and productive.
An HTML Template Generator in Perl
By Peter Reppert
Peter presents a form-based HTML template generator that automatically creates headers and footers, includes style options, allows text entry, datestamps documents, and more. The best news is that it works right from your browser.
Automated Web-Page Monitoring
By Andrew Davison
Tracking out-of-date pages on your Web site can become tedious, especially as your site grows. Andrew provides relief with two applications that help you compare page versions and monitor other changes.
Your Own Search Engine with SWISH
By Adriaan Van Roeden
With the thousands of sites on the Web, surfers want to find what they want and get out quick. SWISH is an easy-to-use tool that will help you create a search facility for your site—your visitors will thank you for it!
C O L U M N S :
Webmaster's Domain
CGI scripts can slow Web-server performance, particularly when using interpreted languages like Perl. Lincoln D. Stein presents some alternatives.
Doing Justice To The Web
As more documents and graphics make their way to the Web, it's relatively easy to digitally change, and possibly distort your original meaning. Catherine Sansum Kirkman explores the issue of "moral rights," both in the US and abroad.
HTML Coding
Laura Lemay looks at some of the extended table features available in Navigator and Explorer, and shows how you can use the table construct as a design element inside any page.
Virtual Worlds
Andrea L. Ames debuts with a brief history of 3D interaction on the Web and explains the rising interest in VRML and related technologies. She also presents VRML basics that let you create your own virtual worlds right away.
Programming with Perl
Handling different browsers with varying levels of HTML support is a constant battle for site developers. Randal writes a script that automatically generates HTML according to a browser's capability.
Java Alley
Bruce Eckel believes it's essential to extend Java to make it a multipurpose development language. And as you might expect, Bruce has a few suggestions on how the language should be amended.
D E P A R T M E N T S :
Reading Room
With all of the Java books on the shelf, it's getting difficult to weed out good titles from the "must haves." Lou Grinzo looks at three Java titles: John Rodley's Writing Java Applets, Michael C. Daconta's Java for C/C++ Programmers, and Gosling and Arnold's The Java Programming Language.
Lab Note
PARTS for Java allows Smalltalk developers to add Java to existing applications. Joe Hughes examines the latest tool from ParcPlace-Digitalk and presents an applet that takes a URL and retrieves the HTML for that Web page.
Special Report
Virtual humans, an emerging field within the virtual-reality community, focuses on the representation of humans in computer-generated virtual worlds. The First Virtual Humans Conference provided a glimpse of things to come from top animators, researchers, and computer scientists. Sue Wilcox has the report.
The Home Page
Editor-in-Chief Michael Floyd talks about "EEEEEMAIL."
News & Notes
Thunder & Lightning Strikes; Phantom Haunts The Web.
The Last Page
Michael Swaine talks about " Web Clichés."
