WebNet Meeting Minutes, May 6, 1997. Moderator: Shuli Roth Minutes: Jerry Berkman Attendance: about 55 1. Intro, Shuli Roth, WSS The Webnet web site is at http://www-wss/webnet. The next planning meeting for webnet is May 8, 3-4pm, 241 Evans. 2. "The Berkeley Home Page", Don Simmonson, Public Affairs He discussed the Berkeley home page and how it is organized. Basically, it is a two level introduction to UC Berkeley. It includes access to a campus map. You can zoom on the map, but there is not much detail. An improved campus map is being worked on and will probably be out by the end of the summer. The upper right of the home page is reserved for an information sidebar, items of current interest, e.g. winning the Rugby National championship, Graduation ceremonies, ... The bottom of the home page has links to various pages, including a link to the WWW Campus Steering Committee page, which lists the members, two from each control unit. Don emphasized that it takes ongoing support; creating a Web page means you are a publisher. They get 8-20 email messages per day, only a few directly related to the Web page. The art work was done by the Office of Public Affairs professional designers. The search only looks at the first page of each registered UCB site. Send comments on whether you think this is adequate to shuli@socrates.berkeley.edu, 2-6157. 3. "Site Design", Roy Tenant, Library Roy has designed/managed several Web sites including the UC Berkeley Library web site, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu, and the Berkeley Digital Library SunSite, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu. He said you need to design Web sites from the ground up, not just "Webify" existing documents. Also, "Content is King". Web design is an iterative process. Pay attention to how users will want to use the site, such as how they will use the search. He feels there should be at least three navigation methods which the users can use to navigate a Web site. Navigation methods include: - "NavBar" - Navigation Bar listing important pages on the site - Search items, to search the whole site or parts of it - Site Maps, either graphical or text based Each site should have a definite "look and feel", so that people know when they are on your site and when they have left it. A common NavBar throughout the site helps with this. Also using templates can save work and enforce a look and feel. He feels failure control is very important. What happens if a user enters a bad URL? E.g. adding a "-" to the Webnet URL results in: 404 Not Found The requested URL /web-net was not found on this server. That is not too helpful. But if you enter http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/xxx, the Digital Library site responds with a page allowing you to go the Home of the Digital Library site, to search the site, etc. Another technique, much used in commercial sites, is to change the text in part of the page each time it is reference. E.g., the left side of the digital library home page one time you load it has a refernce to the "Online Medieval & Classical Library", the next time to "The Jack London Collection", etc. Roy gave out a handout "Web Sites By Design". If using new technology, make sure it looks ok even if the browser being used does not understand the new technology. E.g. on the left side of the NCSA home page, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu, there is a NavBar with entries such as "discover ncsa", "spotlight", etc. If you put your mouse arrow over the NavBar and have Java enabled, it gives a short description of the item under the arrow. If you do not have Java enabled or don't have Java, the page still works, although you can not get the extra info. Old browsers are still out there, in large numbers, often for good reasons. E.g. the computer may not have enough memory to run a newer browser. Also, remember lynx is still in use, both by the visually impaired and by people on slow modem connections. 4. "TranSend", Armando Fox Users connecting over modems often get frustrated by delays in downloading graphics, but are not willing to go to text only. The idea behind TranSend is to replace the router which is between the internet and the modem in the machine room by a computer which does compression on the fly, using data specific compression techniques. For example, graphics such as in gif and jpg files are compressed significantly. This results in a loss of granularity in the image, but much faster response time. The compression is user specific, e.g. it is different for an ISDN connection than for a 28.8 connection. For 28.8 connections, accesses are 3-6 times faster using TranSend. In Soda Hall, they are running TranSend on a network of 4 dedicated Sparc10 computers plus use of other workstations as necessary and available. The workstations are divided into workers, a load balancing agent, and a cache system. The system is fault tolerant; if a work station crashes, the work is reassigned to another workstation. There is a 6 GB cache for recently accessed URLs which improves performance. This also helps if you ask for the uncompressed version of a graphic you have just seen in degraded mode. One drawback is that some sites may not work properly via the TranSend proxy if they need the true IP address of the requester. Alternatively, the proxy may allow access that the actual user is not supposed to be allowed. Another problem is that some browser overlook certain errors in html, but the proxy, when trying compression, does not. The system is very general. In the future, you may see proxies for all sorts of things. E.g. you could have a proxy to get rid of ads on Web pages, or to change British to American spelling (colour->color), or to delete Java Scripts if Java is not enabled. The service scales linearly and Armando estimates an ISP could use it for about 25 cents per user per month. For more information, go to URL http://cs.transend.berkeley.edu/ 5. Java Conference Report, Michael Stanley, IAS & IST Michael reported on a recent Java conference. The Java Development Kit has shored up windowing environment, beefed up the runtime environment, and is more consistent across platforms. There is a 100% Java Initiative, so that you can get a test from JavaSoft that your Java meets a set of requirements. JavaSoft has turned over Java to a standards committee for formal standardization. However they have kept control of the language. (isn't this contradictory?) The conference focused on JavaBeans which are "a component environment", e.g. a toolkit to attach to Java data bases. In the area of security, Sun, Microsoft, and Netscape seem to be relying on the emergence of public keys for certification of Java scripts.