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It is TECFA's own little http server and has several purposes.
Good question. Besides the CERN server (of course!) it is rumored to be Switzerland's oldest WWW server (early spring 1993). About as old as the first available version of the Mosaic client (our first server run under the FTP demon).
Basically there are 2 solutions:
That shouldn't be too hard. Read about "TECFA: TEChnologies de Formation et Apprentissage" first. Start from one of our 2 home pages, or directly browse through the "Overview of Research Projects at TECFA" or the"Teaching" page.
Despite its smallness, TECFA operates internationally. And we don't have the resources to maintain a bi-lingual server.
Because we don't have the resources to invest much time into our server. If you look at our members's list you can see that we have only four permanent positions. Most research and teaching collaborators are either graduate students or work full-time on research contracts. They won't make career by maintaining WWW pages. Me either BTW!
Yes, and sometimes we will look into it.
YES. E.g. I painted this icon back in 1993 as a quick hack to play around with a navigation bar of which you can still see undeleted traces (e.g. on this now pretty useless index page) back when we just got our first Mosaic browser.... but nobody ever wanted to take up this work.
Yes indeed, so use your own judgment. However, important pages are fairly well maintained (though sometimes they may contain outdated links).
We don't have any real excuses for our bad maintenance of the Virtual WWW VL on Educational Technology (except that fact that 1995 has been particularly bad in terms of workload). Now here are the good news: Starting this spring (1996) we will receive funding for those pages and promised: things will change!
YES!
Backgrounded pages look nice, but are often very hard to read. Most so called WebDesigners don't realize that some backgrounds make it REALLY hard on some machines (e.g.on our SUN workstations).
Image maps are totally crummy because you can't see where you go! If you MUST use image maps, please enhance them with JavaScript so that at least people using Netscape can "see" where they are heading for. In addition, Bitmaps are slow and did contribute to the actual desparate state of the Internet. Instead use HTML3 tables for some layouts. Most graphical browsers now can do tables. (Make sure to insert <br> tags in the cells for people using Lynx.
PLEASE read this email message ! In addition some of our students use maps. They surely want pretty things, we are a bit too old for that.
There are basically 2 reasons:
Sure, we do have a series of lightweight articles on that topic (though some of them are NOT on-line). E.g. Check the section on Computer Mediated Communication, Information Systems and Virtual Worlds (needs some updating). Also, note that we use the Web quite intensively as teaching tool. E.g. the outlines of our courses are on-line, some teaching material is too, and our students turn in assignments in HTML form. The Web has been created by Tim as tool for cooperation and we use it mainly for that purpose. Sorry, no report (yet) on using the Web in our "semi-distance teaching" diploma formula.
Yes, we do that. Firstly we teach technical aspects of the Internet. Even before students enroll into our diploma courses, they have to follow a technical introduction course. Most student assignments have to be turned in as HTML. Secondly we address several aspects of CMC, teaching and learning. The "CMC-teaching at TECFA" page has some pointers (needs some more work though).
Daniel Schneider is the official #1 WebMaster. However, anybody at Tecfa has access to the server and most people do maintain areas or help maintaining major pages. We encourage ourselves to sign our pages. Don't send email about randomly selected pages to the webmaster :)
Yes that can happen. Basically a resource problem again. Try it again and scream ! Also note that it sometimes can take up to 6 month before anything is done with your mail (a lot of mail is being safely filtered away for later processing).
