1. LIS650 lecture 5 information architecture javascript, http and apache Thomas Krichel 2004-12-18

2. Sensitivity exercise What do you hate about a web site? What do you like about a web site? All issues to do with that fall into three categories –Technical –Look and Feel –Architecture

3. Reasons to hate a web site Can't find it. Page crowded Loud colours Gratuitous use of technology Inappropriate tone Designer centered Lack of attention to detail

4. Reasons to like a web site useful attractive to look at thought provoking findabilty personalisation

5. Why is it so difficult technical expertise graphical design expertise overall structure

6. IA determines organization content functionality –navigation –labeling –searching

7. Good IA is important for the producer web site an important point of first contact needs to determine overall design before the site is built reorganizing a site is –costly –difficult

8. Topics covered classification navigation labelling making a site searchable

9. The challenge of classification ambiguity: ``a tomato is a red or yellowish fruit with a juicy pulp, used as a vegetable, botanically it is a berry.'' heterogeneity –in a library –on a web site granularity format difference in perspective internal politics

10. Organizational schemes Exact schemes –alphabetical –chronological –geographical ambiguous schemes –topical: should be there, but not the only scheme –task-oriented –audience-specific: open or closed metaphor-driven: not as overall organization Hybrid schemes are not good

11. The mixed-up library adult arts and humanities community center get a library card learn about our library science teen youth

12. Organizational form: hierarchies keep balance between breadth and depth obey 7 +-2 rule horizontally, no more than 5 levels vertically cross-link ambiguous items if really necessary keep new sites shallow

13. organizational forms: hypertext great flexibility great potential for confusion not good as a prime organizational structure

14. organizational forms: database powerful for searching useful if there is controlled vocabulary easy reorganization on the fly or static generation of pages –but ensure robot indexing not good for heterogenous data

15. Navigation aids provide context allow for flexibility of movement support associative learning danger of overwhelming the user

16. browser navigation aids They include –open –back –forward –history –bookmarks –prospective view –visited url color sites should not corrupt the browser.

17. navigation the ``you are here'' mark –pages should indicate site name –navigation should be consistent –navigation not to refer to current pages –highlight current page in a different way allow for lateral navigation

18. Types of navigational systems global hierarchical navigation systems –text –icon local navigation systems: integration with global system can be challenging ad hoc navigation: clear label are required

19. Frames are problematic potential waste of pages real estate speed of display disrupt the page model complex design

20. remote navigation system I table of contents –good in a hierarchical web site –reinforce the hierarchy –facilitate known-item access –resist temptation to overwhelm user indexes –presents key term without hierarchy –key terms found from search behavior –links terms to final destination pages –use term rotation

21. remote navigation systems II site maps –is a graphical representationof the site's contents –new because no equivalent in print –there are automated tools to generate site maps –seldomly well-done –to be kept simple guided tours –important for sites with restricted access –should feature linear navigation

22. labelling a label is short expression that represents a larger set of information. example: ``contact us'' labelling is an outgrowth of site organization, that we have discussed previously. labelling communicates the organization of the site

23. Why bother we need to guess at how users respond to a label users will not spend much time interpreting the label appropriate tone, no ``hot'', cool'', `stuff'' should reflect thinking of the user, not of the owner it is easy to have unplanned labelling

24. Good labelling Sticking with the familiar –main, main page, home, home page –search, find –browse –contact, contact us, feedback –Help, FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions –About, About Us Labels may be augmented with scope notes

25. Grammatical consistency contact us, search our site, browse our content contact, search, browse contact information, search page, table of contents (also good in student essays)

26. Labels as indexing terms use in tags, or in tag use as controlled vocabulary in the database but some search, in fact almost all, engines do not use metadata

27. Textual labels born in Völklingen, (Saarland) in 1965, I studied Economics and Social Sciences at the universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and Leicester. Between Febrary 1993 and April 2001 I lectured in the Department of Economics at the University of Surrey. In 1993 I founded NetEc, a consortium of Internet projects for academic economists. In 1997, I founded the RePEc dataset to document Economics. Between October and December 2000, I held a visiting professorship at Hitotsubashi University.

28. labels as headings good practice: –consistency in terminology: wording on labels is uniform and cohesive –consistency in granularity chunks covered by labels at the same level is roughly equal chunks covered do not vary by their depth

29. Iconic labels There is only a limited ``vocabulary'' of commonly understood labels it is fine for some key concepts labels need to be very consistently placed they can communicate a graphic identity for the page they are easy to find on a page, provided that page is not long

30. Designing labelling systems I start from existing one –put in table or tree (on paper) –make small changes towards consistency ``benevolent plagiarism'' from competitors and academic sites use controlled vocabularies, example yellow pages

31. Designing labeling systems II use a thesaurus, example legislative indexing vocabulary –``see'' link –``see also'' links –broader terms –narrower terms labels from contents: best judged by an outsider labels from query logs labels from user interviews labels from modeling user needs

32. fine tuning a labelling system remove duplicates sort alphabetically homogenize case and punctuation and grammar remove synonyms according to audience make labels as different from one another as possible search for gaps look into the future keep scope focussed consider granularity

33. why not make a site searchable not a tool to satisfy all user's needs not good on poor contents not a cure for bad browsing! needs good planning

34. why make a site searchable cope with bad organization (Foyle's) dynamic contents large contents

35. user needs some want overview, others want detail some need accuracy, others dont care much some can wait, others need it now some need some info, others need a comprehensive answer

36. user's searching expectation known-item searching existence searching exploratory searching comprehensive searching

37. integrated searching and browsing literature deals with separate browsing and searching systems browsing and searching in a single system with multiple iteration and associative learning takes place

38. designing search interfaces I level of expertise –boolean? –concept search? amount returned –comprehensive? –verbose? how much to make searchable

39. designing search interfaces II search target –navigation pages? –HTML only? are there specific types of data that users will want multi-lingual? audience difference

40. features of sophisticated search engines fielded searches sophisticated query languages reusable results set customizable relevance

41. Deal with problems getting too much: suggest boolean AND getting nothing: suggest boolean OR or truncation bad answers: suggest to contact an expert, may be not...

42. today information architecture javascript http apache introduction

43. the is an element that calls a script. It requires a "type" attribute that gives the type of the script language. e.g. type="text/javascript". It takes the "src" argument that gives a URI where the script can be found. Such a script is called an external script. It takes a "defer" attribute. If set as defer="1" you tell the user agent that the script will generate no output. This helps the user agent in that case.

44. example document.write("hello, world"); Interestingly enough, you can place this script in the head or the body. This is an example of an automated script. The user has to do nothing to get the script to run. You can also trigger a script. To do that, we have to study some more HTML attributes. We will do that later.

45. external script You can also create an external file, say hello.js with the line document.write("hello, world"); Then you can call it up in the html file

46. default script language You should set the default scripting language used in the document using the element in the If you don't the validator does not complain, but I don't see other ways to specify the language.

47. Javascript history A programming language that was developed by Netscape for their browser in 1995. To counter, Mickeysoft developed Jscript. It has been standardized by the European Computer Manufacturers Association as ECMA 262.

48. principal features It contains instructions for a user agent to execute. Javascript is not run by the server. It resembles Java, but not the same language. It is an object-oriented language.

49. object In an object-oriented language, an object is the prime focus of attention. An object has properties and methods. Example from real life. Let a bus be an object. –color of the bus is a property –move to next station is a method

50. objects in javascript Properties are accessed by object_name.property_name Methods are accessed by object_name.method_name() where object_name is the name of an object, property_name is the name of a property and method_name() is the name of an object. Note the use of the dot and the parenthesis.

51. Example Syntax rules –Comments are started with // and go to the end of the line. –Instructions are terminated with semicolon Example // create a new object called bus new bus = Object(); // paint it white --- set a property bus.color = white; // move to next stop --- apply a method bus.movetonextstop();

52. event attributes Event attributes can be given to elements (like any attribute, really) The name of the attributes gives a certain event that could happen to the element. The value of the event attribute is the script to be executed when the event occurs on the element that has the event attribute. Example Cow shit is... as the user moves the mouse over the paragraph, the browser fires up an imaginary script called stink that makes it start to stink.

53. core event attributes I "onclick" occurs when the pointing device button is clicked over an element. "ondblclick" occurs when the pointing device button is double clicked over an element. "onmousedown" occurs when the pointing device button is pressed over an element. "onmouseup" occurs when the pointing device button is released over an element. "onmouseover" occurs when the pointing device is moved onto an element.

54. core events attributes II "onmousemove" occurs when the pointing device is moved while it is over an element. "onmouseout" occurs when the pointing device is moved away from an element. "onkeypress" occurs when a key is pressed and released over an element. "onkeydown" occurs when a key is pressed down over an element. "onkeyup" occurs when a key is released over an element.

55. special event attributes "onfocus" occurs when an element receives focus either by the pointing device or by tabbing navigation. This attribute may only be used with the element, and some form elements that we have not covered. "onblur" occurs when an element loses focus either by the pointing device or by tabbing navigation. It may be used with the same elements as onfocus.

56. more special event attributes "onsubmit" occurs when a form is submitted. It only applies to the element. "onreset" occurs when a form is reset. It only applies to the element. some more are only used with other form elements... Let us look at some examples

57. two stupid examples javascript test time <p onmouseover= "document.write('not funny')">joke

58. An even more silly example Bush in the bush prbu=new Image(); prbu.src="bush.jpg"; natb=new Image(); natb.src="natgeo.jpg"; Bush in the bush <img id="bush" src="bush.jpg" onmouseover="document.bush.src=natb.src" onmouseout="document.bush.src=prbu.src" alt="bush in the bush"/>

59. http Stands for the hypertext transfer protocol. This is the most important application layer protocol on the Internet today, because it provides the foundation for the world wide web. defined in Fielding, Roy T., James Gettys, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Paul J. Leach, Tim Berners- Lee ``Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1'' (1999), RFC 2616

60. history 1990: version 0.9 allows for transfer of raw data. 1996: rfc1945 defines version 1.0. by adding attribute:value headers. 1999: rfc 2616 –adds support for hierarchical proxies caching, virtual hosts and some Support for persistent connections –is more stringent.

61. http resource identification identification of resources is assumed through Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). As far as http is concerned, URIs are string. http can use ``absolute'' and ``relative'' URIs. A URL is a special case of a URI.

62. rfc about http An application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. … HTTP is also used as a generic protocol for communication between user agents and proxies/gateways to other Internet systems, including those supported by the SMTP, NNTP, FTP, Gopher, and WAIS protocols. In this way, HTTP allows basic hypermedia access to resources available from diverse applications.

63. http assumes transport http assumes that there is a reliable way to transport data from one host on the Internet to another one. All http requests and responses are separate TCP connections. The default is TCP port 80, but other ports can be used.

64. use of other standards http shares the same registry as the MIME multimedia email extensions. It is based at the IANA, at http://www.isi.edu/innotes/iana/ assignments/media-types/media-types The default character set is ISO-8859-1.

65. Absolute http URL the absolute http URL is http://host[:port][[abs_path][?query]] If abs_path is empty, it is /. The scheme name "http" and the host name are case- insensitive. Characters other than those in the ``reserved'' and ``unsafe'' sets of RFC 2396 are equivalent to their ``%HEX HEX'' encoding. optional components are in [ ]

66. http messages There are two types of messages. –Requests are sent form the client to the server. –Responses are sent from the server to the client. The generic format is the same as for email messages: –start line –message headers –empty line –body Empty lines before the start line are ignored. The request's start line is called the request-line. The response start line is called the status-line.

67. overall operation server side Server sends response, required items are –status line –protocol version –success or error code optional items are –server information –body

68. overall operation: client side Client sends request, required items are –method –request URI –protocol version optional items are –request modifiers –client information Let us now look at different methods

69. GET and HEAD method The GET method means retrieve whatever information (in the form of an entity) is identified by the Request-URI. If the Request-URI refers to a data-producing process, it is the produced data which shall be returned as the entity in the response and not the source text of the process. The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response.

70. Conditional & partial GET The semantics of the GET method change to a ``conditional GET'' if the request message includes an –If-Modified-Since –If-Unmodified-Since –If-Match –If-None-Match –If-Range header The semantics of the GET method change to a ``partial GET'' if the request message includes a Range header field. A partial GET requests that only part of the entity be transferred

71. The POST method The POST method is used to request that the origin server accept the entity enclosed in the request as a new subordinate of the resource identified by the Request-URI in the Request- Line. POST is designed to allow a uniform method to cover the following functions: –Annotation of existing resources; –Posting a message to a bulletin board, newsgroup, mailing list, or similar group of articles; –Providing a block of data, such as the result of submitting a form, to a data-handling process; – Extending a database through an append operation.

72. PUT and DELETE methods The PUT method requests that the enclosed entity be stored under the supplied Request-URI. If the Request-URI refers to an already existing resource, the enclosed entity should be considered as a modified version of the one residing on the origin server. The DELETE method requests that the origin server delete the resource identified by the Request-URI.

73. The request headers Accept:Accept-Charset: Accept-Encoding:Accept-Language: Authorization:Expect: From:Host: If-Match:If-Modified-Since: If-None-Match:If-Range: If-Unmodified-Since:Max-Forwards: Proxy-Authorization: Range: Referer:TE: User-Agent:

74. The status line The status line is a set of lines that are of the form HTTP-Version Status-Code Reason-Phrase The status code is a 3-digit number used by the computer. The reason line is a friendly note for a human to read.

75. Status code classes 1 Informational: Request received, continuing process 2 Success: The action was successfully received, understood, and accepted 3Redirection: Further action must be taken in order to complete the request 4 Client Error: The request contains bad syntax or cannot be understood 5Server error: The request is valid but can not be executed by the server

76. Error codes 100Continue 101Switching Protocols 200OK 201Created 202Accepted 203Non-Authoritative Information 204No Content 205Reset Content 206Partial Content

77. Error codes II 300Multiple Choices 301Moved Permanently 302Found 303See Other 304Not Modified 305Use Proxy 307Temporary Redirect

78. Error codes III 400Bad Request 401Unauthorized 402Payment Required 403Forbidden 404Not Found 405Method Not Allowed 406Not Acceptable 407Proxy Authentication Required 408Request Time-out

79. Error codes IV 409Conflict 410Gone 411Length Required 412Precondition Failed 413Request Entity Too Large 414Request-URI Too Large 415Unsupported Media Type 416Requested range not satisfiable 417Expectation failed

80. Error codes V 500Internal Server Error 501Not Implemented 502Bad Gateway 503Service Unavailable 504Gateway Time-out 505HTTP Version not supported

81. Response headers Accept-Ranges: Age: Etag: Location: Proxy-Authenticate: Retry-After: Server: Vary: WWW-Authenticate:

82. Entity headers, common to response and request Allow: Content-Encoding: Content-Language: Content-Length: Content-Location: Content-MD5: Content-Range: Content-Type: Expires: Last-Modified

83. The body The entity-body (if any) sent with an HTTP request or response is in a format and encoding defined by the entity-header fields. When an entity-body is included with a message, the data type of that body is determined via the header fields Content-Type and Content- Encoding

84. example status: redirect If you use Apache, you can create a file.htaccess (note the dot!) with a line redirect 301 old_url new_url old_url must be a relative path from the top of your site new_url can be any URL, even outside your site This works on wotan by virtue of configuration set for apache for your home directory. Examples –redirect 301 /~krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel –redirect 301 Cantcook.jpg http://www.foodtv.com

85. Apache Is a free, open-source web server that is produced by the Apache Software Foundation, see http://www.apache.org It has over 50% of the market share. It runs best on UN*X systems but can run an a Mickeysoft OS as well. I will cover it here because it is freely available. Wotan runs version 2.

86. Apache in debian /etc/apache2/apache.conf is set main configuration file. /etc/init.d/apache2 action, where action is one of –start –stop –restart is used to fire the daemon up or down. The daemon runs user www-data

87. Virtual host On a single installation of Apache several web servers can be supported. That means the server can behave in a different way according to how it is being addressed. The easiest way to implement addressing a server in different was is through DNS host names.

88. Directives in apache.conf This file contains directives that control the operation of the Apache server process as a whole (the 'global environment'). Some of them are –the server root, where it finds its configuration –the time out for requests –which port to listen another part of apache.conf has extensive settings to deal with content –different languages –different character sets –different MIME types

89. Modules To extend Apache, modules have written. The modules are kept in a directory modules-available Modules that are enabled are listed in the directory modules-enabled. Looking at this gives you vital information about what the server can do.

90. Server directives User –Gives the user name apache runs under Group –Gives the group name the server runs under ServerAdmin –Email of a human who runs the default server ServerName –The name of the default server DocumentRoot –The top level directory of the default server

91. Directory options Many options for a directory can be set with instructions Name is the name of a directory. Instructions can be a whole lot of stuff

92. Directory instructions Options sets global options for the directory, it can be –None –All –Or any of Indexes (form directory indexes?) Includes (all server side includes?) FollowSymlinks (allow to follow server-side includes) ExecCGI (allow cgi-scripts?) MultiViews

93. Access control Can be part of to set directory level access control Example –Allow from friendly.com –Deny from evil.com Sometimes you have to set the order, example –Order allow, deny

94. Authentication This is used to enable password access. In that case the authentication is handled by a file.htaccess in the directory. The AllowOverride instruction is used to state what the user can do within the.htaccess file. Depending on its values, you can password protect a web site. We will not discuss this further here.

95. Userdir This sets the directory that is created by the user in her home directory to be accessed by requests to ~user. On wotan, we have UserDir public_html That is the default, actually.

96. Set up permission for user home directories AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Options +Includes Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec Order allow,deny Allow from all Order deny,allow Deny from all

97. Logs The web server logs every transaction. The are severeal types of logs that used to be kept separately, in early days. 209.73.164.50 - - [26/Jan/2003:09:19:51 -0500] "GET /~ramon/videos/ntsc175.html HTTP/1.1" 206 808 Additional information may be kept in the referer and user agent log. The referer log may have some interesting information on who links to your pages.

98. Virtual hosts Most apache directive can be wrapped in a grouping. This implies that the only hold for the virtual host. Example, from wotan ServerAdmin krichel@openlib.org DocumentRoot /home/connect/public_html ServerName connections2003.liu.edu ErrorLog /var/log/apache/connections2003-error.log CustomLog /var/log/apache/connectios2003-access.log common

99. http://openlib.org/home/krichel Thank you for your attention!