School of Engineering and Applied Science
Department of Computer Science
CSci 41 -- Introduction to Computer Science
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~csci41/fall05
Prof. Michael B. Feldman
mfeldman@gwu.edu

Getting Started with Netscape or Mozilla Composer
Michael B. Feldman - Fall 2005

This file is available online at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~csci41/fall05/composer-brief.html

This guide provides very basic information to help you start using Netscape or Mozilla Composer to create, edit, and publish your own web pages. I have extracted most of this from the Netscape online reference materials. Select Reference Library from the Help menu to retrieve full reference material from Netscape's web site; select Help from the Help menu to open a (somewhat different but fairly complete) help window.

What Is Composer?

A web page composer is a document editor or word processor, similar to other word processors like Microsoft Word. Whereas the output from Word is a document file in Microsoft's proprietary format, the output from Composer is a file in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which is suitable for immediate publication as a World Wide Web (WWW) page.

It is true that Microsoft Word has a feature that lets you save a Word file in HTML format, but the HTML is not very pretty. It's better overall to use a program that's designed to produce HTML.

Netscape or Mozilla?

The Netscape and Mozilla programs are built by the same team and are almost identical. You can think of them as slightly different versions of the same program. Netscape (through version 7) and Mozilla are integrated program suites, containing a web browser, a web page composer, an e-mail program, and other good things. Mozilla is especially easy to download and install; there are versions for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers. In this document, we'll assume you are using Mozilla; if you're using Netscape, just mentally substituting that name for Mozilla will probably give the same results.

Creating and publishing a web page

Here are the basic steps you'll follow to create and publish a new web page. 
  1. Start Mozilla.
  2. From the File menu, select New Composer Page.
  3. Create a web page using basic editing tasks, such as entering text, and formatting characters and paragraphs.
  4. Put the finishing touches on your web page by adding a table or inserting an image.
  5. Create links to other places in your page, and to other web pages.

    6. Publish your web page so that others can view it.
Since you are probably familiar with the basics of using a word processor, let's assume you can do the basic page editing and quickly describe the things that are different about a web page: More details on basic editing follow this initial discussion.

What are your site's file names on the SEASCF server?

How to publish your page at SEASCF (Windows)

  1. Open the file that you want to publish.
  2. From the File menu, choose Publish. This will open a window with Settings and Publish tabs.
  3. In the Settings window, type your real name as the Site Name.
  4. In the space provided, type the publishing address, which is (no matter what your real name or user ID):
    ftp://tangle.seas.gwu.edu/public_html
    Leave the HTTP address blank, as that is automatically derived from the publishing address.
  5. In the space provided, type your SEASCF user ID.
  6. In the space provided,  type your SEASCF password.
  7. Now switch to the Publish window
  8. In the lines provided, enter
    the title of your page (e.g., Jane's Home Page)
    the file name (e.g. index.html)
    Leave the Site Subdirectory blank.
  9. If your page uses any image files, check "include images" and "use same location as page". Once you've published an image file on the server, you need not publish it again.
  10. Click Publish.
  11. If all goes well, your file and any associated images will be transmitted from the PC to the server.

How to view your page online

Open a browser window and enter your URL. Again assuming your user ID is janesmith, your URL at SEASCF is always

http://student.seas.gwu.edu/~janesmith

This will display your index.html file, and is equivalent to using

http://student.seas.gwu.edu/~janesmith/index.html.

How to include a link in your page

A link (also known as a hyperlink) is an active part of a document. Clicking a link can take you to Every link contains the web address for the page that the link refers to. This web address is called the page's URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Follow these steps to create links from text or images in your page to other web pages:

  1. In the Composer window, select the text or image from which you want to add a link to another page.
  2. From the Insert menu, choose Link, or click the Link button in the Composition toolbar.
  3. To link to a file on your hard disk (say, your photo the first time you are publishing it), click Choose File and then browse the hard disk till you find the file.
  4. To link to a file on a remote computer (say, your advisor's home page), type the file's URL.
  5. Click OK.

Working with images

Composer allows you to work with the two kinds of images that most web browsers support: GIF files lack the higher quality of JPEG files, but they're more compact and display more quickly in web browsers.

You can get images by creating them yourself, scanning them, or buying them as part of a commercial clip art package. You can also find GIF images in the Internet's many image archives.

Note: If you intend to use images in your own web pages, make sure you get permission from the owner of the image, or use royalty-free clip art so you don't infringe on a possible copyright.

How to include an image in your page

An image is actually a separate file that does not "live" in your Composer document; the image file might be located on your hard disk or on a remote computer. Follow these steps to insert an image file located on your hard disk into the document you're editing:
  1. Click where you want the image to appear in your document.
  2. From the Insert menu, choose Image, or click the Image button in the Composition toolbar.
  3. Click Choose File to locate the image file on your hard disk.
  4. You can skip the Dimensions and Appearances tabs. If the image looks wrong once you've published it, you can change these later and re-publish it.
  5. Click OK.
Tip: You can drag an image from a folder on your desktop or from your Navigator browser window and drop it into your document. Composer places the image at the insertion point location. To change the image's properties, double-click the image.

To edit an existing page that's on your hard disk

Instead of selecting New Composer Page, just use Open File to open the file, then select Edit Page from the File menu. A Composer window will open with the current file in it.

Finally...

This document is obviously a very brief and limited introduction, just enough to get you started. Composer has many, many capabilities; you are encouraged to "play" with them and learn by doing. Make sure you keep a "clean" copy of every page you experiment with, so if your experimentation gives you something weird-looking, you can go back to the simpler version!

Enjoy!

Last modified August 25, 2005