<HTML><!--This file created 8/11/98 11:43 PM by Claris Home Page version 3.0--><HEAD> <TITLE>Writing Web Pages</TITLE> <META NAME=GENERATOR CONTENT="Claris Home Page 3.0"> <X-CLARIS-WINDOW TOP=140 BOTTOM=480 LEFT=24 RIGHT=554> <X-CLARIS-TAGVIEW MODE=minimal></HEAD><BODY BGCOLOR="#62D6AC"><CENTER><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TABLE BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=6 WIDTH="90%"> <TR> <TD WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#EEEEEE"> <H1><FONT FACE="Helvetica">WRITING WEB PAGES</FONT></H1> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Although your Personal Data Sharing is delightfully simple to use, it's also quite powerful for a PDA program. You have the option of serving up plain text notes, mixed HTML/plain-text notes, or </FONT><A HREF="#rawHTML"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">raw HTML</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> code. In addition, you have the ability to now provide a </FONT><A HREF="custom.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">custom default page</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> for your Notepad Server.</FONT></P> <H2><FONT FACE="Helvetica">THE BASICS:</FONT></H2> <OL> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Create a folder in your Notepad called "<B>Web</B>" then write or file any number of text-only notes in this folder.</FONT></LI> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Or, you can install <B>Notepad Setup</B>, which will ensure you have a proper "Web" folder and install two example Notes in that folder (index.html and About Personal Data Sharing)</FONT></LI> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Name each note, following these rules:</FONT> <OL> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Make sure the names of the notes contain </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#FF0000">none of these characters<BR> </FONT><FONT SIZE="+1" FACE="Helvetica"><B>? / , " : + > <</B></FONT></LI> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Don't name any note except for a </FONT><A HREF="custom.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">very special</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> one </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#FF0000"><B>"index.html"</B></FONT></LI> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">The file name parser uses the </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#FF0000"><B>first word of each note title </B></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica">as the virtual filename. Select distinct names for your notes keyed by the first word of the title.<BR> <B>Example</B>: "My Server" and "My Cat Farm" both evaluate to "My" in a URL request. Either change the name of one note or do concantenate the words using an underline character like so "My_Server" and "My_Cat_Farm"</FONT></LI> </OL> </LI> <LI><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Now, if you want to </FONT><A HREF="#advancedTopix"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">do fancy stuff </FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica">with your notes, read on. Otherwise, </FONT><A HREF="serve1.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">go try it out!</FONT></A></LI> </OL> <H2><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><A NAME=advancedTopix></A>ADVANCED TOPICS:</FONT></H2> <H3><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Spicing Up Your Notes with Embedded HTML Tags</FONT></H3> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Since the server basically takes a note and encapsulates it in a HTML frame, you can add hyperlinks and HTML formatting within your served notes (without having to do </FONT><A HREF="#rawHTML"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">full blown HTML</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica">) in order to spice up the pages a bit. For instance, in your Note about your car, you could reference a picture of it stored somewhere else by writing </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><TT><IMG SRC="http://my.other.site.com/username/images/mycar.gif></TT> </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica">and when your Notepad page is served up, the browser will run off and fetch that image and nobody will be the wiser!</FONT></P> <H3><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><A NAME=rawHTML></A>Serving Raw HTML code</FONT></H3> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Since version 1.2 of Notepad Server you've had the ability to serve straight HTML code from your Web directory, allowing you immense flexibility in how you present your information to the world. Couple your server, your creativity, and </FONT><A HREF="http://www.tow.com/"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Foundation Systems'</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> nHTML and you have an un-beatable creation and service platform right in the palm of your hand.</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><H3><FONT FACE="Helvetica">So, How does it work?</FONT></H3> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">It's blazingly simple to serve straight HTML. All you have to do is write the code in a note, being sure to follow the HTML spec by enclosing the whole document between </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><HTML></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> and </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"></HTML></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> tags. Notepad Server recognizes the </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><HTML></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> tag and serves the exact text of the page rather than doing any dynamic formatting of it.</FONT></P> <H3><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Your Note Should Look Like This:</FONT></H3> <BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><B><TT><HTML></TT></B><TT><BR> <HEAD><TITLE></TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#000000"><TT>A Title</TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><TT></TITLE></HEAD><BR> <BODY><BR> </TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#000000"><TT>Insert Body Here</TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><TT><BR> </BODY><BR> </TT><B><TT></HTML></TT></B></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE> <H3><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Server Side Includes</FONT></H3> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Also supported by Personal Data Sharing is a series of variables that you can access from either your text notes or, even better, your raw HTML documents. On other platforms, these are called <B>Server Side Includes</B>, so that's what we'll call them here.</FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">A Table of all SSI supported in Version 1.5 of Personal Data Sharing is </FONT><A HREF="supported_ssi.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">available here.</FONT></A></P> <H4><FONT FACE="Helvetica">How do I USE These Things?</FONT></H4> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Simple. Say you want to include the access counter in a sentence. You'd write something like this in your Notepad:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TT>So far, </TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><TT><COUNTER></TT></FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TT> chunks o' knowledge have been spewed into the ether by this server.</TT></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">And you'd get:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TT>So far, 296 chunks o' knowledge have been spewed into the ether by this server.</TT></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Or, say you always want the title of your HTML document to reflect the name it has in the title bar of its Notepad entry. In you header, you'd write:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#330099"><TT><HTML><HEAD><TITLE><NOTE_TITLE></TITLE></HEAD></TT></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">And even if you changed the name of the note to Zaphod_Beeblebrox, the title returned by your HTML will reflect that.</FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Nifty, huh?</FONT></P> <H2><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Special Characters:</FONT></H2> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Unless you're lucky enough to use only the 0-127 ASCII code in your alphabet, you need to be able to display "International Characters" (such as: <B>ü, ø, å, ß</B>)</FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">One solution to this is to go through your notes and subsitute in the &#000 HTML code for each character and we tried to have PDS do that that but it's VERY annoying. (Slow, inaccurate, and generally stupid.)</FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">So, we developed a compromise: Unlike 90% of the world's HTTP servers, we have chosen to follow the RFC 2068 standard for HTTP 1.1 Servers and provide a way for the browsers to interpret these characters AS TYPED by setting what's called the <B>charset</B> token in the server's message headers. We also include the same data in a <TT><META></TT> tag in the HEADER of any generated HTML pages. This helps the browser decide what encoding to use when viewing your page.</FONT></P> <CENTER><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TABLE BORDER=0 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" CELLPADDING=4 WIDTH="60%"> <TR> <TD> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Here's a Sample Header From nHTTPd to Illustrate:</FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">HTTP/1.0 200 OK<BR> Server: nHTTPd/1.5<BR> Content-type: text/html; </FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica" COLOR="#CC0000">charset=ISO-8859-1</FONT><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><BR> Content-length: 1024</FONT></P> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </FONT></CENTER> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><TABLE BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4> <TR> <TD VALIGN=top ROWSPAN=2> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">In nHTTPd Setup, you can select from any of these MIME charsets or None to turn off this option entirely.<BR> Depending on demand, I may add other encodings.</FONT></P> </TD> <TD BGCOLOR="#62D6AC"> <CENTER><FONT FACE="Helvetica"><B>charset Selections:</B></FONT></CENTER> </TD> </TR> <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#62D6AC"> <CENTER><FONT SIZE="-1" FACE="Helvetica"><B>ISO-8859-1</B>: The WWW Standard<BR> <B>ISO-88259-2</B>: Better for European Characters<BR> <B>X-MAC-ROMAN</B>: The Standard MacOS Set<BR> <B>US-ASCII</B>: The 0-127 Character Set<BR> <B>None: </B>No charset token is presented</FONT></CENTER> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </FONT></P> <P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">When I first introduced this feature with Notepad Server 1.2, I suggested that you add by hand into your raw HTML the <TT><META></TT> tag containing the charset token. That is no longer required as this data is provided in the server's message header.</FONT></P> </TD> </TR></TABLE> </FONT><P><FONT FACE="Helvetica">| </FONT><A HREF="start.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Start</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica">| </FONT><A HREF="serve1.html"><FONT FACE="Helvetica">Serving YourPages</FONT></A><FONT FACE="Helvetica"> |</FONT></P></CENTER></BODY></HTML>