www.inf Web Publishing with Mozilla/Netscape 7

If you want to use Mozilla or Netscape 7 to edit web pages on the www.inf.ed.ac.uk web server, then you need to check/set up your Mozilla/Netscape 7 settings as follows.

Before you can edit any page, you need to have a web publishing account. If you don't have one, and you are a member of staff, then please fill out this web form to request a publishing account. Note that this is the same web publishing account that you use to edit pages via CVS.

If you want to edit Institute web pages that are hosted on the www.inf.ed.ac.uk server, eg www.ipab.inf.ed.ac.uk, then you would replace any occurrence of www.inf.ed.ac.uk or publish.inf.ed.ac.uk below with www.ipab.inf.ed.ac.uk and publish.ipab.inf.ed.ac.uk respectively.

Please also make sure you read the section on editing pages at the end of this document.

The Settings

In the text below, the terms "Mozilla" and "Netscape 7" are interchangeable.

First goto the "Edit" menu of Mozilla and choose "Preferences...", then click on the "Composer" Category and setup the right hand pane to look like:

Composer options screen

Then click "Ok" to return to the browser.

Next start up the Composer by selecting "Edit Page" from the "File" menu. A new Composer window will appear. Now select "Publishing Site Settings..." from the Composer's Edit menu. In the window that appears, you should have two entries in the Publishing Sites list, one for normal www.inf pages over http and another for secure pages over https. Either click on any existing entries and edit them, or click "New Site" and add entries as below. For regular pages:

HTTP Site Settings screen

And for secure https pages:

HTTPS Site Settings screen

Then click "Ok" to return to the Composer.

Now that you've setup the publishing sites, when you use Composer to edit a web page and then choose "Publish", a "Publish Page" dialog box will appear with the correct values in the "Settings" tab, you can/should confirm this before actually trying to publish your web page.

Editing Pages

Though the Mozilla Composer is convenient for making quick changes to web pages, and for those who want to edit web pages in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment like they would a Word document, it does hide you from the complexities of web publishing, but those complexities are still there. The main issues are those of valid HTML and web pages using the standard Informatics headers and footers.

Valid HTML

To try and ensure that our web pages are as accessible as possible, all HTML on the web server is validated to make sure it conforms to certain standards. So you rely on Mozilla to generate valid HTML for you (it normally doesn't do too bad), if it doesn't and you try to publish a page, the publishing will fail, but it won't tell you why!

If you are confident with HTML, you could click on the "<HTML> Source" tab at the bottom of the Composer window to see the HTML that Mozilla actually produced.

Standard Headers and Footers

The bulk of the pages on www.inf are based on this template. When you look at the template in a browser it shows a complete HTML web page. However, if you edit this template via CVS then you'll see it contains just:

<!--#include virtual="/ssi/doctype.inc"-->
<TITLE>No Title</TITLE>
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/metabase"-->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/header.inc"-->

<h1>No Title</h1>

Text goes here.

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/locationbar"-->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/footer.inc"-->

When the web server serves these pages to your browser, it expands the #include virtual=... to the actual HTML that they represent, which can be quite a lot of extra HTML. For example the 11 lines above become 121 lines of HTML. It's this fully expand version of the page that Composer is editting.

What does this mean for you? Well it means that you must restrict your updated/edits to the main body of the page, in the above template example, from the "No Title" heading to the end of the "Text goes here.". If you edit any of the standard header or footer, then at best your changes will be ignored, and at worst you will break the the validation and the page won't publish, again Mozilla wont say why.

You can use the "HTML Tags" and "<HTML> Source" tabs at the bottom of the Composer window to help you avoid these areas. In the Tags view, you need to avoid editing anything before and including the indicated "DIV" tag, and anything after and including the indicated "P" tag:

Screen shot showing what not to edit

When looking at the HTML source, don't edit anything before and including the line:

<!--END:/ssi/header.inc-->

or anything after and including the line:

<!--START:/cgi-bin/locationbar-->

If you understand all that, then you're probably better of using the CVS method to edit web pages anyway!

Permissions

Finally the other reason publishing may fail is if you don't have permission to edit the page you are trying do publish. If you've only made a minor edit to a web page, avoided the standard header and footers as described above and your Composer settings are all OK, then contact webadmin@inf to check that you actually have the necessary permissions.

Unfortunately when web publishing fails for any of the reasons above, Mozilla just returns with "Unknown publishing error occurred". This is another reason why CVS is the recommended route.

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