web-hints index

Much of this page is obsolete. The web servers run by Best Internet Corp were shut down in October 2001. Their BESTWWWD was replaced with NTT's Verio Iserver.

Hints for web pages at http://www.best.com/~username

This is the [an error occurred while processing this directive] access to this page.

This document assumes that you know a little bit about creating HTML documents, and would like to know how to take advantage of the special features that are available to customers using www.best.com. The server software is BESTWWWD/2.1 - it is an extremely customized http daemon that is mostly compatible with httpd-1.3 from NCSA. As of 20-Jul-95, it is documented now in www.best.com/FAQ/bestwwwd.html

Default document
Server-side includes (and counters)
ENV variables
Using a consistent style
Background colors
Hints from other members of best.com
HTML Utilities
Font Sizes

Default document

When you tell people about your site, you can either tell them the name of a particular file (such as "http://www.best.com/~inwap/homepage.html") or the name of a directory (such as "http://www.best.com/~inwap/").
[I prefer using the directory form - it is fewer characters to type.]

The way in which the server presents a file depends on instructions in the system-wide .bhtaccess file. This is documented in http://www.best.com/faq/bestwwwd.html

If the browser asks for a specific file, the server will fetch it.
- Files with extensions of ".txt" are presented as plain text.
- Files with extensions of ".gif", ".jpg", ".xbm" are presented as pictures.
- Files with extensions of ".html" or ".shtml" are presented as HTML documents. (The ".shtml" extension is used for server-parsed documents - where the server interprets the document before presenting it to the browser. This is how counters are implemented.)
- Files with extensions of ".cgi" are executed using the Common Gateway Interface protocol. This is one way of creating dynamic documents on the fly.
- Files with recognized extensions (such as ".mov" or ".au") will be presented specific applications (QuickTime movie, audio file, etc) and the browser will do the right thing if it has been told how to deal with specific MIME types.
- Files with binary extensions (such as ".exe" or ".zip") are transfered as binary data. Some browers (such as Netscape) will ask the user for a place to put the file, instead of trying to display the binary data on the screen.
If the browser provides the name of a directory, but does not include the trailing slash, the server will return "302 found - Directory URL requires trailing slash", and the browser will ask for the URL again, this time with the trailing slash. (In Netscape prior to version 3.0, this shows up as ":80" being tacked on to the host name.)
If the browser requests URL for a directory (and includes the trailing slash), the server will look for a default document to present. The server at www.best.com looks for:
1. index.html or index.htm - a regular HTML document with an index of the directory or other text that you wish to present.
2. index.shtml or index.sht - an HTML document with server-side includes. (Note that this file is searched for only if index.html and index.htm both do not exist.
3. index.cgi - an executable script that returns headers and data conforming to the CGI protocol. (Only if the above four files are all absent.)
4. a fake document with an unsorted directory listing (only if none of the above index files exist). If there is a README file, it is output otherwise "<H1>Index of /this/directory/</H1>". Then <HR><PRE> directory listing </PRE>.
Note that unlike the NCSA httpd, BESTWWWD does not include the contents of any HEADER file in the fake document, and outputs README first instead of last. It also does not do anything special with the .message file, which is used by the FTP server.
If you use my index.cgi from http://www.inwap.com/mybin/, the directory will be sorted and has other nice features.

Server-side includes (and counters)

My test-it.shtml document describes how to do server-side includes and how to do counters. It tells

how to enable these features
how to do counters
how to use #exec cgi="..."
how to use #exec cmd="..."

ENV variables

These links display the list of ENV variables for:

a simple CGI reference (env.cgi)
HREF="env.cgi/foo/bar?string1+?string2"
an html document (with descriptions of each variable)

Note that in the second example PATH_INFO and PATH_TRANSLATED are set due to /foo/bar after the cgi script's name and that ARGV is set due to a "+" separated list after the "?" query indicator.

Using a consistent style

The beginning of my documents all start with two lines in this format:

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Writing Web pages for Best.COM</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<I>web-hints index</I><HR>

In this way I make sure every document has a TITLE and that the document starts with one line of text (in italics) and a horizontal rule. I did this so that browers which are capable of displaying the document while downloading it (such as Netscape) have something to put on the screen while fetching the in-line images. My documents all end with five lines in this format:

<P><HR>
Up to the index for <A HREF="../">INWAP.COM</A>.
<ADDRESS>
Maintained by <A HREF="joe.html">Joe Smith</A> - <A HREF="mailto:jms@inwap.com">jms@inwap.com</A>
</ADDRESS></BODY></HTML>

This puts a paragraph space and a horizontal rule before any navigational links ("previous", "up", "next" or "home"). The ADDRESS section (which Netscape displays as italics) has two links; one to my personal home page and one for e-mailing comments to the author.

Some pages (such as this one) have <BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffcc"> to make the background be a lighter shade of gray or yellow. In many of my index.shtml documents I use

<P><!--#flastmod file="index.shtml"--><HR>

instead of just "<P><HR>" at the bottom. This puts the file's modification time into the document.

If you want to see the gory details, check out index.txt, which is the source to this particular page in text form.

Background colors

I put <BODY BGCOLOR="#DDDDDD"> is some of my ReBoot pages, but then had to change most of the background colors since it looked just awful under Windows-3.1. (Any RGB value that is not part of the base color set gets dithered, and the dot pattern causes flicker and makes small fonts difficult to read.)

Although there are 16 million combinations for BGCOLOR="#rrggbb", only three are guaranteed to look good on all platforms (Mac, PC, UNIX). They are: "#c0c0c0" (default gray), "#ffffff" (white), and "#000000" (black). Colors in the tool bar, such as "#ff0000" (bright red) and "#ffffcc" (pale yellow), are OK but any other color is a gamble.

I often look at Web pages with a black-and-white monitor (Sun SPARCstation-SLC, it has a 1152 x 900 x 2-color display) and find problems when people put black text on a dark background. On such a display, all shades of gray from 000000 to 7F7F7F show up as black, and gray levels from 808080 to FFFFFF show up as white. Whenever BGCOLOR is set to a dark value, it is up to the author of the page to make sure that TEXT, LINK, and VLINK are all set to light colors. (ALINK is not important.) To make text show up as white on a dark background, select a color "rrggbb" such that hex2dec(rr)*0.299 + hex2dec(gg)*0.587 + hex2dec(bb)*0.114 is greater than 128.

Names of colors

The draft specification of HTML 3.2 mentions that the latest batch of browsers support sixteen widely understood color names.

The 16 well-known color names (default MS-DOS VGA palette)
Saturated		Dimmed
black	`#000000`	silver	`#c0c0c0`
blue	`#0000ff`	navy	`#000080`
red	`#ff0000`	maroon	`#800000`
fuchsia	`#ff00ff`	purple	`#800080`
lime	`#00ff00`	green	`#008000`
aqua	`#00ffff`	teal	`#008080`
yellow	`#ffff00`	olive	`#808000`
white	`#ffffff`	gray	`#808080`

A list of color names is in rgb.txt, which comes with the X Windows library.

A great GIF that shows all the colors at once can be found at www.phoenix.net/~jacobson/rgb.html

Netscape Navigator 4.0 uses a different set of default colors.

Hints from other members of best.com

Matt Dillon's documentation on his bestwwwd Web Server was put on-line 20-Jul-95.
Ken Churilla's search and counter page.
BEST Users Resource Nexus (BURN) has a large section on the World Wide Web
If you have a PPP account with best.com, check out Schaft's secrets.
If you have a telnet-only account, log in to shell.best.com and use
```
lynx http://www.best.com/~schaft/bestonly.shtml
```
Schaft's hints for access control.
Pierre's web-authoring hints.
David Siegel's web wonk tips.
Current bandwidth usage for the web server for www.inwap.com
Larry Sherman's Computerrific site with fancy image counter.

Other HTML utilities

Weblint, experimental version
fiximg, Patrick Atoon's perl program to add WIDTH= and HEIGHT= to all <IMG SRC=> tags by reading the size from GIF and JPG files.

Updated: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 19:55:18 GMT

Up to the index for INWAP.COM.

Maintained by Joe Smith - js-cgi@inwap.com