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Webwatch
August 2003.
Searching the net can be very rewarding but it can also be most frustrating when it refuses to work properly. Read on, it is probably not your fault……..
In an ideal world, any search will give an immediate "hit", a link to a site that contains all that you need. Hopefully, if you had found the Association's site, say by searching for "Childhood ITP", you will have found sufficient information and that the information within the site is presented in a way that "works" on your computer. Sadly, this does not always happen, information is presented in a variety of formats, some of which may not work on your machine.
Search results, for example using Google, are shown as a list of details. The first line will be the page title of the document. If there is nothing in brackets in front of the title, the page is probably a "normal" webpage. If there is a code in brackets at the start of the line as in "[DOC] The Intercontinental Childhood ITP Study Group", it means you may have trouble as the page is not a normal webpage. In this example, the link points to a file compatible with Microsoft's Word software. Instead of displaying the page, clicking on the link will prompt a question that asks if you want to open the file or save it. Opening it means you need to have software on your machine that will read Word files, but of course, not everyone does. If you do not have Word software and do not intend to purchase it, you can get a free piece of software that will read the files from www.microsoft.com:80/office/000/viewers.asp.
Other files that are quite common on the internet are "PDF" files. These are "Portable Document Format" files, a system designed by Adobe.com to present information in a way that preserves the document format. In a normal webpage, the software re-sizes the text and layout to suit your screen size. With PDF files, this does not happen, the formatting created by the author is fixed. This has great advantages if the document contains tables and images that need to be in fixed places on the page. Another advantage to the author or publisher is that PDF files can be locked to prevent unauthorised editing. Unfortunately, PDF files do not usually have clickable links to other sites, so you lose the "web" aspect of the internet, the way one thing leads to another. On many machines, the web browser you use will read these PDF files. If not, you need to obtain and install the free reader software called Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html.
Occasionally, the file type is for Microsoft's Powerpoint software, the code you will see in Google's hit list will be .PPT or .PPS. This software is designed to show presentations. These are usually business oriented and consist of bulleted lists of words, images and even video. Such presentations normally support a speaker but are often useful viewed on their own. As above, if you do not have PowerPoint software on your machine, a free viewer is available from the Microsoft address above.
Another really annoying aspect of non-standard internet content is caused by designers trying to make websites do fancy tricks. In a "standard" webpage, the text, images, colours etc. are coded using "html", or Hyper Text Mark-up Language". Mark-up means that special codes are used to show which bits of text are bold, which bits underlined etc. Html is almost standardised so a page coded or "marked up" in html should be perfectly readable on any computer. The trouble is, it does not happen! There are two reasons for this. The first is that different software presents a given html page in a different ways. This is not usually a big problem, the pages are at least readable. The second reason is that html is not designed to do fancy tricks like "drop down menus" etc. so designers use other methods. It is these other methods that cause problems as they are not properly standardised across the computers of the world. What works on one machine looks a dreadful mess on another. There is not very much a user can do about this except to remain content that it is not their fault. Some people seem to feel guilty they do not "know enough about computers" but in a well designed system, you should not need to know anything at all about computers to use them efficiently. If you find a website that looks very promising but fails to work on your machine, you could try looking at it using a friend's machine. You could even complain to the webmaster about using non-standard web design techniques!
Happy surfing
Howard