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| The Internet Guide for Professionals, Legal Edition | Internet & Intranet Tools Training |
When Microsoft Windows 3.11 with its built-in networking capability was introduced, it came with a video that showed novices how to set up a network. Although it did not explain why you did certain things, it gave great comfort to many people to see, rather than read, how to do it. For newbies, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a hundred pictures. If you are an Internet novice, consider Executive Internet Consulting L.L.C.'s video primer entitled, "The Internet Guide for Professionals, Legal Edition." The video is divided into several sections. The first three sections--the introduction, a section on bookmarks and a section on searching the Internet--deal with the World Wide Web. The following sections discuss FTP, Gopher, e-mail, and newsgroup and mailing-list functionality. The information ranges from terse to esoteric, although the majority of the information presented is appropriate. The video is good about explaining the Internet's alphabet soup terms like URL (uniform resource locator), FTP (file transfer protocol), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and Gopher (the mascot of the University of Minnesota where Gopher was developed). The introduction also describes the functionality of the Netscape Navigator desktop, covers navigation through the World Wide Web via hypertext links and buttons, and shows you how to copy and paste from a Web page. The section on bookmarks shows you how to create, organize (including the creation and deletion of folders), sort, and return to your bookmarks. However, the examples used relate to the bookmark functions in Netscape Navigator 3.x. Later releases of Netscape and that other browser, Internet Explorer, handle bookmarks quite differently. The section on searching the Internet provides examples of searching the World Wide Web with search engines, including the use of operators (AND, OR, and NEAR). The section on FTP and Gopher is terse, perhaps accurately reflecting their unjustified (in my opinion) decline in the wake of the graphical Web browser. Of course, when the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface first appeared, I could not understand why anyone doing word processing would abandon hitting the F8 function key in WordPerfect to underline text, typing the text, and then hitting the F8 key again, instead of taking the right hand entirely off the keyboard, grabbing the mouse, moving the pointer over the underline button, clicking the button, typing the text, and doing the whole thing over again to turn underlining off. The e-mail section describes some naming conventions, outlines the mail process, tells you how to reply to e-mail you receive, and informs the viewer that encryption programs are available to make the process more secure. This section also describes attachments to e-mail. However, the video fails to warn viewers about some of the pitfalls in sending file attachments. For instance, failing to identify the file format of the attachment can create a great deal of problems for the recipient. We do not all use the default suffix extensions for Word (.doc),WordPerfect (.wpd), or whatever (.xyz). If you don't identify the format of the file attachment, the recipient may have to open it with every program on the hard drive. The failure to address practical usage tips and issues like this demonstrates the limited depth of some sections of the video. The last section of the video shows you how to subscribe to newsgroups, and how to view articles in the groups using Netscape Navigator 3.x's newsreader. It also describes some of the many ways of subscribing to mailing lists that will e-mail you automatically until you unsubscribe. The video moderator properly acknowledges that the procedure varies from one service to another, but enough examples are given that the viewer can discover the concept behind the mechanics of the operation. Like the video that came with Windows 3.11, The Internet Guide for Professionals does not usually tell you why to do something, but it shows you how. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism. Compared to the Internet, network concepts are easier to identify and explain. The way the Internet developed, there may be no underlying, unifying concept capable of explanation. The video was also made when Netscape Navigator 3.x was the dominant browser, and the demonstration is particular to that browser. An experienced Web surfer will have little difficulty translating Netscape commands into Microsoft Internet Explorer commands, but will learn few tricks. An inexperienced surfer might spend a long time looking for the "reload" function in Internet Explorer that is called "refresh" (like the function in Windows 95 Explorer, and Windows 3.x file manager before it) instead. Watching the video left me with two impressions. First, it is not particularly aimed at the legal community--although they did use the Web site and mailing list of the ABA and National Lawyer's Guild respectively as examples. Second, it would not have taken that much more time to show the corresponding features of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the other dominant browser. Nonetheless, I have little doubt that inexperienced users will benefit from viewing the video, particularly if they are using Netscape Navigator 3.x. |
Executive Internet Consulting L.L.C. $89.95 Reviewed by Steve Schmidt, attorney, Singer, Smith & Williams, Albuquerque, N.M. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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