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Reinforcement Learning and
Artificial
Intelligence (RLAI)
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How
to edit open web pages
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It's easy to create and edit open pages;
this page tells how. Please consult
the
style
guidelines before editing. If you just want to add to the end
of a page, see
extensions.
Warning: the open pages system is no longer being
actively maintained or developed. It works, mostly, but should
not be looked to as a long-term solution to creating web content.
In short, its use is deprecated.
The
recommended way to edit
open web pages is by using Composer,
the web-page editor built into
the Netscape browser and its open-source equivalent, Mozilla.
Composer allows editing in the WYSIWYG style (What You See Is What You
Get) familiar from modern document editors. This
approach gives you complete control of the page and is very convenient
and intuitive. If you can point, click,
and type then you will have no trouble getting started in composer (a
review of composer).
You don't have to use Mozilla as your browser when you're not editing,
but if you do then you can instantly edit any open page you come
across. To follow this approach:
- Download and install Mozilla.
- Establish Mozilla settings.
See here.
- Browse to the page you
would like to edit. Reload the page if your browser window has been
open for a while and may not be up-to-date.
- Open the page for editing
by selecting "Edit page" from the File menu, or just by hitting
Command-E (on Mac) or Control-E (on
Windows or Linux). This opens the page in Composer, Mozilla's built-in html
editor.
- Edit the page in
Composer. Composer is WYSIWYG, so
it is very intuitive and easy to use. .
- Publish the page
by
selecting "Publish" from the File menu, or by hitting Command-shift-S
(on
Mac) or Control-Shift-S (on Windows or Linux). If all goes well
you
will get a little window with green checkmark(s) which pops up
briefly and then goes away. If the publishing fails there will be
one or more red Xs and the little window will remain open, with a
cryptic error message. If this happens, click on
"Help" at the bottom of the page and
do not close the Composer window. This might be a good time to
write your changes out to a local file (menu File>Save As).
- Refresh the browser window
to see your changes.
It
is also possible to edit open pages without Mozilla/composer, using
arbitrary other tools, by making and editing a local copy and then
publishing it back out to the web. Each time you edit:
- Browse to the page and make a
local copy. In Mozilla, you select "Save page as"
(Command-S)
from the "File" menu.
- Edit the local copy in
your own way, with your own tools.
Just be sure not to alter the comments at the end of the file,
particularly
"<!--Auto content-->" and below.
- Publish the local copy back
to
the server. In Mozilla, browse to your local copy and then select
"Publish as" from the "File" menu. Use the filename and other settings
from 1 to publish to the right place. Be sure to check include
images.
If all goes well you
will get a little window with all green checkmarks which pops up
briefly and then goes away. If the publishing fails there will be
one or more red Xs and the little window will remain open, with a
cryptic error message. If this happens, click on "Help" at the
bottom of the page and follow the instructions there.
Finally, if
you don't want to download
and use mozilla at all, make your page any way you want and then just
upload it to the open-page server using the
python put
script. After downloading the file "QuickPut" to a convenient
place, then in the same directory type:
python QuickPut yourPage.html
targetURL.html
where "yourPage.html" is of course the name of the web page you created
by other means, and "targetURL.html" is the place on the web page
server to which you want to upload the page. Normally you will
have downloaded some open page (e.g., by invoking "view source" on a
browser, then cutting and pasting to a text file) and will be uploading
it back to the same URL. As an example, targetURL.html might be
"rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/rlai/test.html". The server will ensure that you
don't accidently overwrite someone elses changes, as usual. That
is, it will allow the upload only if the file does not exist or has not
been changed since you downloaded it (and you have not changed the text
of the page after the "<!--Auto content-->" tag).
New pages can be created and authored simply
by browsing to the page
and editing it in Mozilla. In these cases it is
as if all possible pages already exist and simply need to be
written. If you are using your own authoring tools, then you can
create the page yourself, locally, and then publish the local copy as
described above. All these methods work properly with
subdirectories, creating them when necessary.
It is also possible to create
private
and semi-private pages.
button
Adding Non-html Files
The mechanisms
described so far suffice to safely
create and edit any html content, including embedded images (these must
be less than 1 megabyte). Uploading
read-only content such as pdfs or binary files is unnecessary because
they can be kept on non-open-page servers and linked to from open
pages, as discussed
here.