A few answers, but more questions
By Chris Richardson
As many of you may already know, I
maintain an internet website for 8BS.
There are many things on it that
advertise 8BS.
Things such as animated pictures of
rotating BBCs, sounds of BBC being
switched on, the 8BS advert, the 8BS
catalogue, articles and many other
things.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) pages
that make up a website are actually
just plain text full of commands that
tell the PC 'web browser' software how
to present the information.
It is obvious from this that it is a
very simple thing for a BBC to read
these HTML pages. Simply strip out the
commands (that are surrounded by
chevrons <>) and you are left with
plain text.
Sprow sent a ROM that does this (on
this issue). I wrote a very simple
Basic program that does it too as a
demo for those that cannot use the ROM.
A PC web browser loads the whole page
in and then you can read up and down it
by scrolling the page. The page is
usually covered in 'hypertext' links.
These can be a word, series of words or
even a picture that when clicked on,
something that has been defined to
happen will happen. Usually this will
be a link to another part of the page,
another page or another website. It
could also be a file to download or a
program to run or a tune to play and so
on.
I would dearly like to be able to use
my BBC on the internet.
Unfortunately I see a number of
obstacles. Firstly, I have an internet
connection, but there are loads of
protocols that need to be observed and
passwords to pass, I have not the first
idea how these would be passed. Code
would have to be written to do this job
to dial up and log on.
Secondly, some HTML files are huge, so
it would not be a simple case of
reading the file into memory and then
scrolling up and down it. Saving it to
disc may not work either as I could see
a file being larger than a BBC floppy
disc capacity. So unless a hard drive
is used, that only leaves the 'read it
as it goes by your nose' option which
is not the ideal situation (but better
than none).
Thirdly Hypertext. This could be
implemented fairly easily as the BBC
browser would only act on the few
commands that it could do something
about. Mainly download files and jumps
to other pages. The problem here is,
when would the link be presented?
1. As it appears on the screen? Maybe
you want to read the rest of the
text first though.
2. At the end? Then it might be out of
context and you may have forgotten
what it was about.
Search Engines!
There are very important things on the
internet called search engines. If you
don't use a search engine, you could
flounder around on the internet going
nowhere and wasting loads of time.
Someone like myself who wants people to
visit the 8BS website will visit many
different search engines, submitting my
internet address.
The search engine software will then
visit the 8BS website and put some of
the words from the site into its
database.
Imagine Joe Bloggs comes along and
wants to find 8BS. He puts a search
into that search engine, something like
'8-Bit Software'. The search engine
looks through its database for
occurrences of those words and presents
a list of internet addresses where
those words appear. Other combinations
of words such as BBC and Master will
bring up a wide variety of results too.
So, how would a BBC be able to use a
search engine?
Then there is Email. How would that be
handled?
Remember, that to get on to the
internet you must first find an
internet provider that you will have to
pay. They then give you a phone number
and series of codes and passwords that
you use to log on to the internet
through their server.