Going Graphical

There's No Place Like Home Page

By Kenny Greenberg


I have begun to feel like Rip Van Winkle recently. Content for years to operate from the Unix shell prompt, and although aware of what Mosaic could do, I had paid only mild attention to what I considered a lot of hullabaloo over graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Life didn't look like fun on the bleeding edge of technology, and I couldn't understand why anyone, especially a newcomer to the Net, would not want to work their way up from the simpler world of direct commands. I did it, so they should have to do it, too.

Then my friend Jim invited me to see some new Windows toys that he had got up and running with relatively few bugs on a SLIP connection. At first we ran into a few configuration conflicts as we played with Winsock Gopher. I watched patiently as Jim rebooted, and thought to myself, "Why bother," while I mused over the simplicity of that simple six-letter command "gopher." Then we got it going, and okay, it was pretty neat to be able to point and click and cut and paste. But I can almost do that using the dreaded command line.

Then we moved on to the Eudora mail program. It was a faster and more logical approach; we could see which messages were in which folders and could easily process files on the fly. "Well," I thought, "no one ever said the command-line interface could do everything."

Next we tried the Trumpet News Reader. I had to admit that it was nice to point and click to select and unselect newsgroups, and to effortlessly deal with news articles and threads.

Jim must have known he was torturing me, because what I really wanted to see was Mosaic, and he was saving this for last. Instead, he ran Windows Sockets FTP, which presented a beautiful double directory of remote and home files, with the ability to preview files before transfer. I was almost beginning to believe in this stuff when at last we moved to Mosaic.

I was still somewhat dubious as we proceeded to transfer a document that contained several Graphic Image Files (GIFs). Graphics can average 50Kb to 2MB in size, and transferring them can take quite a while, even with a 14.4Kbps modem.

Once we had the document, however, I became an instant GUI convert. Here was a series of pages with fonts in different sizes, effects such as bolding and italics, and beautifully embedded images, all done with the quality one finds in a modern desktop-published product. There were even colorful buttons to click to select other links.

And that wasn't all. A click on still another icon opened a sound file, causing a crisp on-line greeting to play. Here was something pleasant that my eyes and ears could not deny. It was certainly more fulfilling to click on an icon and see an image, rather than finding the word "[IMAGE]" in a text file; a placeholder for a graphic that could not be accessed.

Of course, a GUI is not going to help you if you need to write on-line Unix macros or if you are on a remote system that expects you to speak Vax. In fact, Jim recently had to ask me how to edit and make world-readable his .plan file. However, because a SLIP connection leaves almost all of the work to your computer, the issue of a macro is generally a local one that Windows and Macintosh machines are capable of dealing with.

Although I hate to admit it, the need for understanding how to retrieve or send files is dwindling. MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), for example, enables a program or an image to be attached to your e-mail with exceptional ease.

Just as the arrow key seems made for Gopher, the GUI finds its most appropriate use on the World-Wide Web, a network of servers that link hypertext documents. Many systems can access the Web with the command "www," although this will not give you a graphical interface.

Browsers such as Lynx take you a step closer by reading the hypertext (HTML) documents that let you jump from a highlighted link to other parts of a document, or to pages at sites outside your local service. The protocol used in HTML allows you to read text and access Gopher and FTP sites, and perform telnet sessions. It is even capable of offering image and sound files that your browser program will let you download if it is not capable of displaying the image or playing the sound.

What distinguishes the Web from most servers is the ease with which links can be embedded in a document. In Gopher's format, the contents of a text file often cannot be known until it is read. In an HTML document, you can provide a description of a file that can be clicked on to open. HTML documents allow more creativity because the hypertext links are not confined to any order or format. The personality of the author can be expressed in the prose that surrounds each link. This has become the basis of the home page.

While some home pages are fairly straightforward, such as the WWW main home page of CERN at http://info.cern.ch, a wilder side of the Web is expanding rapidly as individuals put their own home pages on-line. Hotlists of sites that a user finds useful or interesting can be created.

If Gopher can be compared to a stately library with neatly catalogued index files, the collection of home pages on the Web is like a collection of general and specialty magazine stores. There is rapid change, and the subject matter is varied. One becomes accustomed to the personality of a site as much as to its content.

For an excellent starting point to this world of personalized home pages, try Poor Richard's Almanac (http://www.iia.org/~rosenr1). For the adventurous who don't mind a little foul language, try Justin's Links to the Underground (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/jahall/index.html).

Businesses and nonprofit organizations have begun to make creative use of the Web as well. The obvious potential for displaying art has been taken up by sites such as Kaleidospace (http://fire.kspace.com), Cirque de la Mama (http://lancet.mit.edu/cirque/introduction.html), and Reiff II (http://www.informatik.ruth-aachen.de/Reiff2), a museum in Europe that is accepting artwork for on-line exhibition. The commerce directory at http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/commerce.html lists a host of commercial enterprises on the Web, including Corporate Agents, Inc., (http://www.corporate.com) a company that will help you to incorporate within 24 hours, and Downtown Anywhere (http://www.awa.com) which is a virtual city that features libraries, museums, and a Main Street of on-line stores.

As we move deeper into the multimedia era, the fully interactive Internet art installation, on-line catalog, and brochure are realizable through the use of sound and videoconferencing software. In fact, if you already have a video board, CUSeeMe is a videoconferencing program available for free via FTP at gated.cornell.edu.

I ran straight home from Jim's house and immediately created a home page and placed it on my art Gopher on Panix (Gopher to panix.com/nyart). I now pay attention to all of the announcements I get about new World-Wide Web sites, and I'm feeling more like old Rip on his second day out, when he is getting a bit more accustomed to things. I just became a beta tester for Panix's new WWW server, and for the time being I have a home page (http://www.panix.com/kgreenb/kghome.html) there. So drop by, kick your shoes off, make yourself at home, and see why I say, "There's no place like home page."

Kenny Greenberg (kgreenb@panix.com) is a neon artist and owner of Krypton Neon in Long Island City, NY.

Copyright (c) 1994 by Mecklermedia Corporation. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without permission.