LINGUIST List 7.14

Thu Jan 4 1996

All: More about the LINGUIST Web site

Editor for this issue: John H. Remmers <remmersemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. remmersemunix.emich.edu, More about the LINGUIST Web Site

As the moderators announced in LINGUIST 7.4, LINGUIST can be read
on the World Wide Web via a new site located at Eastern Michigan
University. The URL is

	http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/html/

In my capacity as software consultant for LINGUIST, I developed
the programs that generate HTML versions of issues and the tables
of contents pages that link to them by number and by topic, as
well as the facility that permits searching subject lines. I would
like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to LINGUIST
readers, say a few words about the Web site and our future plans
for it, and invite comments.

Production of HTML-formatted issues began late in 1995. At the
present time you will find volume 7 and a portion of Volume 6 on
the Web site. Although we cannot at this time commit to a
definite date for doing so, we intend to convert all back issues
of LINGUIST to HTML and make them available on the Web, in the
same format and with the same access methods as the issues
currently available. In particular, searches of the complete
LINGUIST archive by subject and other criteria will be supported
via HTML forms.

The HTML version of each issue is produced by software and posted
directly to the Web site at the same time that the plain text
version is submitted to the LISTSERV for distribution by email.
Consequently, you may find that a new issue can be accessed via
the Web sooner than it appears in your mailbox.

The Web version of LINGUIST takes advantage of the hyperlink
capabilities of HTML in several ways. As indicated in the
moderators' earlier message, URLs and authors' email addresses
are automatically turned into live links. In addition, at the end
of each message there are links for responding privately to the
author, or publicly by submitting an article to the list. (There
is also a "Return to table of contents" link which is potentially
confusing and may be eliminated in the future. Since an issue can
be pointed to from several "tables of contents", selecting that
link will not always return you to the one from which you came.
We suggest using the "go back" selection in your browser to
return to the appropriate table of contents.)

The search facility is a minimal prototype that we plan to
enhance extensively to provide various kinds of selective
searching. At the present time you can use it, e.g., to retrieve
discussion threads. For more general search functionality, search
engines at various LINGUIST archive sites can be used for now--
these will not return hyperlinks to our HTML-formatted issues, 
of course.

LINGUIST has complete control over the design of this Web site.
We invite feedback from LINGUIST participants--problem reports,
suggestions, features wish-lists. Feel free to send comments
directly to me, or to the moderators. I can't guarantee that I
will respond to every message, but I am looking for guidance
from the users and will be conscientious about reading all
suggestions.
				- John -

John H. Remmers | remmersemunix.emich.edu
Eastern Michigan University | http://emunix.emich.edu/~remmers
Dept. of Computer Science | NOTE: Do not read this message fast. It
Ypsilanti, MI 48197 | is never right to read messages fast.