Within the PageSpinner window, your new home page doesn't look at all like a web page. To turn all the < and > signs into a page we need to view your new page with a web brower. Of course, don't expect your page to look much like a web page when we use a browser. All you should see is a blank page with the title you typed in displayed in the window's title bar.
Things get a bit tricky here again if you are actually reading these instructions using Navigator. You could make a new browser window to see your page in using the "New Web Browser" item in the Navigator "File" menu and then flip back and forth between this window and the new one. Alternately, you can just let your window replace these instructions for a moment and then press the Navigator's "Back" button to return to them after you have had a chance to appreciate your home page.
PageSpinner has a feature designed to make it easy to view your page with a browser. There is a button in the PageSpinner toolbar that looks a bit like the Netscape icon.
If you look carefully, you will notice that the "N" usually found in the Netscape icon has been replaced by an "M" (which is appropriate since this button can be configured to launch either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer).
You should be aware of one aspect of how PageSpinner uses Navigator to preview your page when you click on the preview button. When viewing a page, Netscape displays the URL for the page in the "Location" bar near the top of the browser window. If you look at the location displayed in your browser it will probably look something like
file:///www/index.html
Note that this URL starts with "file" rather than the "http" prefix used in the URLs we have discussed in class. A URL starting with "file" instructs the browser to read the file directly from the disk of the machine on which the browser is running. The network isn't used at all! This is a perfectly reasonable way to preview a file. You should be aware, however, that sometimes the results of accessing an HTML file as a "file" are different from accessing the same file through the network using a URL that starts with "http". While you can view your pages using a "file" URL, everyone else (including the graders) will need to access your pages through the network using an "http" style URL. As a result, at the end of each lab you should view your pages using an "http" URL to make sure they work as you expect.
As practice, we can view you incomplete page using an "http" URL now.
with the "99jrs" part replaced by your login identifier.http://www.cs.williams.edu/~99jrs/index.html
As I indicated above, the only sign of success to look for in this step is that your title should appear in the title bar of an otherwise empty Navigator window.