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Creating a Sample Page

Arachnophilia

Arachnophilia is the text-based freeware Web authoring tool available on the McBryde 118 lab machines. This is an easy-to-use editor with many menu options for formatting and linking text and objects.

In the creation of this sample page, we'll look at the very basics to get started.

• Launch Arachnophilia from the menu.
• From the Arachnophilia menus, select File -> New File-> HTML File.
• A dialog window asks you to customize the colors for your background and links. Once you've done this, click OK. A new window will open for editing with the skeleton tags pre-configured. Use the previous table to be sure you understand the inserted tags, (you can ignore the meta tags).

  

  

• Right click on the editing window and a toolbar pops up with options for formatting and inserting.
• Select Ordered List. This will format the list tags for you at the current position of the cursor. Enter some text for each of the List Item tags.

   

• Now, add an image. From the menubar, select Commands -> Graphics/Misc -> NewImg. You will be prompted to designate the path for the file to add. (If you do not know the name of an available graphics file, or one is not available to select, you can always save an image to use from a Web browser. From Netscape, or IE, right click on an image and choose Save Image as... from the popup menu.)

  Once you have entered an image name or selected an image, the editor will add the necessary tags pre-configured with the file pathname. Next you will need to fill in an alternate text description for the image with the ALT attribute.

• Add a document link. Select Commands -> Links/Sound -> BareLnk. The tag will be placed at the current cursor position. You will need to put the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for the document in the double quotes. And add some text inside the anchor tags. (See the CS1205 Home page example below.)

  

  
  

  

• Now, add a table. From the menubar, select Commands -> Tables -> TableWiz. A dialog window will ask for details on the format you want for the table. Select the number of rows and the number of columns and click OK. The editor will automatically add placeholder data, (e.g., R1C1, R1C2, etc.), in the cells which you are to replace with your text.

  
  

  The resulting document and table tags are shown below:

  

   

• To view the file, save it. Then select Preview -> Identify Browser ->Browser1:.

  

   

  

  If a browser isn't already selected, search the directories for your favorite browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer.

  When this is done, select Preview -> Select & Launch Browser. This will launch the selected browser and open your newly created web page.

  
  

   

  An example Web page created with the above tutorial might look as follows: