Public Information on the Public Web

Computer Life column for September 19, 1998
by
Richard Gordon

Everyone else is talking about the Starr report; I might as well, too.

The most significant thing about the past week's brouhaha has been the Internet's role in disseminating the report to every Netizen in every county, city, and 'burb.

The Starr report, once declared a public document, was issued directly to the public without the intervening filtering of any media outlets. Members of the voting public can judge for themselves whether Starr's report is a "witch hunt" or a noble "quest for the truth" or something in between.

I suspect that the salacious nature of the content had something to do with Congress' decision to issue the report on-line. However, it's also possible that this is the first time the Web has been mature and robust enough to deal with a high-demand, public document like this one.

Thanks to the growth of the Web and the relative ease of publishing something on it, more public information is in the hands of the public than at any time in our history.

The differences are ones of scale and ease. When a nearby county in Pennsylvania put its property assessments on-line, the public howled. People felt that their privacy was violated because the Web made it too easy to see what anyone's house was worth. Somehow, that was different than having information available for inspection at the Assessor's office.

Instead of hunting for the right office in which to look something up or instead of plunking down $14.65 to purchase a copy of a report from a government printing office, we can download, read, or browse public documents at any time, from anywhere.

In short, because we are so occupied with Monicagate, a lot of us have finally noticed that our governments put information on line. If the Starr report brings more people on-line, that will help make for a more informed electorate in the future.

As more and more sites put up copies of Starr's report, making it easy for Netizens to bypass bottlenecks at the House of Representatives Web site (www.house.gov), we really saw the Web working at its best, as it was intended when Tim Berners-Lee first imagined it.

A note for Web Weavers

Among other things, last week's column lamented the difficulty I had finding a particular Web document that had moved to a new site. If you maintain on-line documents for fun or profit, you also may need to move information from one location to another.

Or, what if someone has published a slightly incorrect version of your Web address (e.g., "inet.net/~richard/nj" instead of the correct address--"inet.net/~richard/NJ"--yes, case matters!)?

In both of these cases, you can redirect browsers to the correct location automatically. The easiest way to do so is to include a special command or HTML tag at the beginning of your old Web document (or in a page you put up at the incorrectly published address) to take Netscape and Internet Explorer users to the correct location.

Go to your favorite resource on using HTML, the language behind the Web, and look up how to use the "META" tag to "refresh" the screen with the new page. This week's tip points you at one such source.

If certain Dutch Webmasters had done that at the old location of the document I sought last week, I would have been tip-toeing through the tulips within seconds.

Tip of the week

Even if you use something like Front Page to generate the HTML code behind Web pages you publish automatically, odds are that you may sometimes want to change the HTML to customize your Web documents.

If you need to look up HTML codes, visit Kevin Werbach's "Bare Bones Guide to HTML" (werbach.com/barebones). It's not a tutorial introduction to building Web pages, but a list of lots of HTML codes--and their options--making it easier to see how you can tweak your document.

Copyright © 1998, The News Journal Company

Computer Life Index