Publishing on www.cern.ch

• Writing in HTML
• Welcome page and directory browsing
• User-Supported Directories
• AFS directories in the Web
• Protecting your documents
• Writing HTML Fill-Out forms
• Executing cgi scripts/programs in the server
• Clickable images
• Checking the links of your Web
• Any problems/questions/suggestions ?

Also:

• How to make your information searchable
• How to provide a list of modified documents from your pages: whatsNew.
• How to get statistics from the WWW log files of www.cern.ch
• wwwlab: For editing your HTML files or converting to HTML.

Writing in HTML

The first contact with WWW as an information provider is to write your documents in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). You can be in any of these three situations:

• You have to create new documents and don't know HTML. In this case, you may use your your favorite ASCII editor and an HTML guide for the HTML syntax. These are some interesting guides for authors.
  or
• You want to use an HTML editor. There are some installed in wwwlab which is part of the www1 cluster. Any information provider of www.cern.ch has access to this cluster and the tools installed there.
  or
• You have some files already written in another format and you want to put them on the Web. You will probably need a converter which translates your files to HTML. These are the tools you can use to convert your files to HTML.

For any of these situations, a good starting point is this Style Guide of Tim Berners-Lee. Information about HTML guides, HTML editors and HTML converters can also be found in the WWW Support Page

Welcome page and directory browsing

If an URL ends in / like http://www.cern.ch/Papers/ the user will get by default the file named Welcome.html or Index.html or Overview.html from the Papers directory. These are the names you should give to the entry point file of your directory.

If you want to provide a hypertext view of the directory listing you have to create a empty file in the directory called .www_browsable Otherwise the directory listing is disable.

User-Supported Directories

Once you have an account in wwwlab, you can make available for the Web files under your home directory with URLs of form http://www.cern.ch/~username. In order to use this feature you have to create a directory called WWW under your home directory in wwwlab and put the files there.

AFS directories in the Web

In case you have your Web documents in a AFS directory they can be visible via the Web. If your documents are public the directory must have in its ACL lookup and read access for cern:nodes.

How to make your AFS accessible via the Web?

If you own already a directory in the machine www.cern.ch you can create a symbolic link from it to your AFS directory and this will make your files available via the Web.
Example: I own /W3dir/ExpSupport which is visible using the URL: http://www.cern.ch/ExpSupport and also I have information in my AFS directory /afs/cern.ch/user/s/susana/public/WWW. I create the link like this:
ln -s /afs/cern.ch/user/s/susana/public/WWW /W3dir/ExpSupport/info The AFS files will be visible using the URL http://www.cern.ch/ExpSupport/info

If you want to make your AFS files visible in the Web do not have any access to www.cern.ch ask by email to www.support@cern.ch and indicate the name you want to appear in the URL.

Protecting your documents

CERN httpd allows you to protect your pages on the Web. Access can be restricted according to username, IP address, or both. Access control can be tree-level or file level by using access control lists.
In this particular server, an information provider can protect a directory or a specific file in his Web:

1. Inside CERN.
2. From a list of specific IP addresses you specify.
3. Providing username and passwords

For the first two options, you can send an email to www.support@cern.ch just specifying the URL you want to protect. For the third option, we provide a utility based on HTML forms and a set of cgi scripts called WebAdmin. WebAdmin permits one to handle the protection of a Web directory with no intervention from the webmaster of the server. One or more persons are responsables of the administration and protection for their Web. WebAdmin permits:

• Any user to change his own passwd to access the Web pages
• The administrative group to add users, passwords and modify group and setup files.

If you want to use WebAdmin for protecting your Web on this server, contact www.support@cern.ch telling them which directories you want to protect.

Protecting your AFS documents

If your files are in AFS all the above is possible. Besides you may want to protect your files using an ACL so the other AFS users cannot read them. You have to add in that ACL lookup and read access to the user wwwprot. This is necessary so that the httpd can read your AFS files.

Writing Fill-Out forms

Fill-Out forms are useful in case you need to get information from the users. They are used for many purposes: registration forms for Conferences, interfaces to query engines, feedback to the authors of documents ...
In case you want to write forms, there are several tutorials you may consult:

• Mosaic for X version 2.0 Fill-Out Form Support
• Web Communications Fill-Out Forms Tutorial

An example is the form to send an email to www-support.cern.ch used on this server.

Executing cgi scripts/programs on the server

cgi scripts can be used to:

• handle HTML forms,
• create documents on the fly,
• create an interface to an existing database, etc

If you have written some HTML forms, or you want to create documents on the fly, you will need a script/program on the server that creates them. These scripts/programs have to be located in a special directory on the server; it cannot be in the same one as your HTML files. If you need a directory to place your cgi scipts/programs, send a request to www.support@cern.ch

• More information on server side executable scripts.
• Also you need to know CGI:Common Gateway Interface which is a standard for external gateway programs to interface with HTTP servers.
• The cgiparse is placed in /apps/WWW/bin/cgiparse on www.cern.ch

Perl Libraries to write CGI scripts

In www.cern.ch there are these Perl libraries you can use:

• libwww-perl: A Perl 5 library of packages/modules for building WWW clients and tools.

In the directory /usr/local/lib/perl.local :

• cgi-lib.pl : A simple Perl library which is designed to make writing CGI scripts in Perl easy.
• CGI.pm : A perl 5 library which uses objects to create Web fill-out forms on the fly and to parse their contents.
  This library requires perl 5.001 which is in /afs/usr/local/etc/perl.To use this library in your Perl5 scripts you have to include the following lines at the beginning:

   
  BEGIN {
       unshift(@INC,'/usr/local/lib/perl.local');
  }
  use CGI;
  

Clickable images

You can use the htimage cgi program to handle clickable images support. You can see a demo. To create a clickable image in www.cern.ch you need:

• A image in gif format.
• The htimage cgi program.
  The way to call htimage on www.cern.ch is /htbin/htimage/config/file
• An image configuration file.
  To create a clickable image, you have to provide a configuration file. This file can be edited by hand or automatically using mapedit in wwwlab.

Important note: There is a problem when using relative URLs in an image configuration file. All the details are in the FAQ for information providers page.

Checking the links of your Web

The users of www.cern.ch can use DoctorHTML to check the links and the syntax in their Web from a starting point.

Any problems/questions/suggestions ?

If you have any problems/questions/suggestions about the information above or anything related with providing information in www.cern.ch, send an email to www.support@cern.ch