My Web Page (Millenium Edition)
I had not updated my home web page for more than 5 years (it was soooo... 20th century). In the intervening years, the web has become more important and widely used.
For example:
- Documents meant for students were often only accessible as files on the Department's Unix system. (They were not linked to web pages.) Students had to copy the documents to floppies or download them with ssh to get their own copies.
- They were often in formats (such as dvi or PostScipt) which most (Windows) PCs didn't know what to do with.
- Many of the documents existed in various places, sometimes in different versions (but same file names).
In short, too much content was not accessible on the web. Furthermore, managing the content (which version is relevant or most recent) was tedious and error-prone.
Two birds: One stone
Both problems (the birds: accessibility and content management) can be addressed with a reasonably-designed web-site (the stone):
- All relevant content is made accessible in some standard format (such as .html, .pdf, .txt, .zip. etc.). (Obscure formats like .dvi are converted to a standard format.)
- Identical content can be rendered differently (e.g. pdf and html). (Of course, there is a single source file that produces the different renditions.)
- Identical content can also have links in different places (e.g. a document that is relevent to more than one course).
- Content that has different versions can be linked to appropriate web pages. (For example, course123-year2004 and course123-year2005 can have a Lab1 link; the content may differ.)