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.:Getweb.
S A T E L L I F E presents
G e t W e b: The E-mail tool for Access to the World Wide
Web
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INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Using GetWeb! GetWeb provides access to a number
of Internet
resources through a simple exchange of e-mail messages. GetWeb
employs
specific and easy to learn commands that give you a powerful
but
inexpensive tool to access health information from the World
Wide Web, even
if you do not have full Internet access.
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USING GETWEB
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PART 1 - BASIC FEATURES
A. RETRIEVING A SINGLE PAGE
B. UNDERSTANDING THE RESULTS RETRIEVED
C. RETRIEVING MORE THAN ONE WEB PAGE
D. FOLLOWING HYPERLINKS TO OTHER WEB PAGES
E. USING GETWEB TO SEARCH THE WORLDWIDE WEB
F. HOTLIST OF RECOMMENDED WEB SITES
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PART 2 - ADVANCED FEATURES
A. FOLLOWING CHAINS OF LINKED DOCUMENTS
B. BREAKING COMMANDS BETWEEN MULTIPLE LINES
C. SPLITTING MESSAGES
D. REQUESTING A WEB PAGE AS AN HTML SOURCE DOCUMENT
E. BINARY FILES
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USING GETWEB - PART 1: BASIC FEATURES
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A. RETRIEVING A SINGLE PAGE
SATELLIFE's GetWeb server allows you to request the text
content of World
Wide Web pages through e-mail. To get information from a particular
World
Wide Web page such as the World Health Organization (WHO)
Home Page, you
would:
1. Compose a new e-mail message to the following address:
getweb@usa.healthnet.org
2. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the
message, type the command get followed by the URL
of the Web page you want to retrieve.
3. If your mailer software automatically inserts
unwanted text (a signature, for example) at the
beginning or end of your message, an error will
occur. You can prevent this by enclosing your
commands in a begin and end block as shown below.
The GetWeb server ignores any text that appears
before or after the block.
4. Your message will look like the following:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get http://www.who.org
end
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B. UNDERSTANDING THE RESULTS RETRIEVED
When SATELLIFE receives your message, the GetWeb server retrieves
the
requested page from the Web, formats it as plain text, and
sends it to you
as an e-mail message.
There are two main sections in the results message:
1. Text: The top portion of the document contains
text from the World Health Organization Home Page.
Some of this text contains the titles of other
referenced Web pages of the WHO called hyperlinks.
Every hyperlinked reference is numbered in brackets
at the end of each line.
2. References: The bottom section contains a list of
these same reference numbers and their corresponding
URLs (or World Wide Web address).
A truncated portion from the results message is shown below.
Please note
that Web pages may differ than the sample shown. This is because
Web sites
are updated frequently and often change.
Sample Result for Retrieving a Single Web Page
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 10:48:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: getweb@usa.healthnet.org
To: <you@yourdomain.com>
Subject: <URL:http://www.who.org/> WHO/OMS: World Health
Organization
----- Message Text -----
WHO/OMS World Health Organization
[IMAGE] [IMAGE]
What's New[1]Governance[2]Health Topics[3]Information Sources[4]
Reports[5]Director-General[6]About WHO[7]Search[8]
31 May : World No-Tobacco Day[9]
[IMAGE] [IMAGE]
What's New[10] | Governance[11] | Health Topics[12] | Information
Sources[13] | Reports[14] | Director-General[15] | About WHO[16]
|
WHO Regional and Other Offices[17] | Related Links[18] | Other
UN Web
Sources[13] | Reports[14] | Director-General[15] | About WHO[16]
|
WHO Regional and Other Offices[17] | Related Links[18] | Other
UN Web
sites[19]
Site Map[20] | Search[21] | Contact WHO[22]
co World Health Organization / Organisation mondiale de la
Sante',1997-1998
Acknowledgements[23] - Copyright notice and disclaimer[24]
*** References from this document ***
[orig] http://www.who.org/
[1] http://www.who.org/home/whatsnew.html
[2] http://www.who.org/home/governance.html
[3] http://www.who.org/home/map_ht.html
[4] http://www.who.org/home/info.html
[5] http://www.who.org/home/reports.html
[6] http://www.who.org/inf-dg/
[7] http://www.who.org/aboutwho/
[8] http://www.who.org/home/search/
[9] http://www.who.org/toh/worldnotobacco99/teaser.htm
[10] http://www.who.org/home/whatsnew.html
[11] http://www.who.org/home/governance.html
[12] http://www.who.org/home/map_ht.html
[13] http://www.who.org/home/info.html
[14] http://www.who.org/home/reports.html
[15] http://www.who.org/inf-dg/
[16] http://www.who.org/aboutwho/
.......
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C. RETRIEVING MORE THAN ONE WEB PAGE
GetWeb can also be used to retrieve more than one Web page
at a time.
Simply include several URLs in a single message.
For example, if you want to retrieve the following three
URLs representing
the Home Pages of these organizations.
1. World Health Organization - http://www.who.org
2. SATELLIFE - http://www.healthnet.org
3. Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) - http://www.nsrc.org
Your message would look like the sample message below:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get http://www.who.org
get http://www.healthnet.org
get http://www.nsrc.org
end
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D. FOLLOWING HYPERLINKS TO OTHER WEB PAGES
Web pages often reference other Web pages by what is called
a hyperlink.
Hyperlinks are an electronic link to other pages at the same
Web site, or
to pages of related interest at a different site.
As you saw in the previous example, each hyperlink is represented
with a
reference number in brackets. These numbers correspond to
a list at the
bottom of the message, which provides the URL for each of
the linked pages.
To follow a hyperlink, simply identify the URL and send another
e-mail
message requesting that page.
For example, if you wanted to know more about the World Health
Organization
you would want to follow the hyperlink titled "About
WHO." To do this you
would:
1. Look in the Top section of the results message
and find this title and the reference number in
brackets which is [16]. (See example results above.)
2. Locate [16] in the list of reference numbers in
the Bottom section of the results message and
find the corresponding URL address, in this case:
http://www.who.org/aboutwho/
3. You would then send another message to GetWeb to retrieve
the new URL.
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get http://www.who.org/aboutwho/
end
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E. USING GETWEB TO SEARCH THE WORLDWIDE WEB
GetWeb can be used to access several Internet Search Engines
in order to
search the World Wide Web for information. The vast repositories
of
information on the World Wide Web are of highly variable quality
and search
engines will retrieve both useful and not so useful results.
*** SEARCH ENGINES GETWEB SUPPORTS
GetWeb is not itself a search engine. But using GetWeb, you
can make use of
certain search engines on the Web. Currently GetWeb supports
the search
engines AltaVista, Yahoo!, and Infoseek.
*** SPECIFYING KEYWORDS
In order to conduct a Web search, you will need to select
a word or set of
words, called "keywords," which describe your chosen
subject. When you
submit these keywords to the search engine, it searches through
the text
posted on a large number of Web sites for those specific words.
When it has
completed the search, the search engine gives you a list of
all the pages
on which those words can be found.
We suggest that you try your search first with AltaVista.
Then, if the
result is too large, or does not contain useful information,
try one of the
other search engines.
To access one of these search engines:
1. Compose a message to
getweb@usa.healthnet.org
and leave the subject line blank.
2. In the body of the message type search followed by
the name of the search engine, all in capital letters,
and the keywords for your search.
Suppose that a user, joe@anywhere.healthnet.org, needs statistics
about
malaria in Africa. Joe hopes this information is located somewhere
within
one of the millions of documents making up the World Wide
Web, and decides
to execute a Web search using the AltaVista search engine.
Joe reasons that the sort of document he is looking for might
contain the
words "malaria" and "Africa." He therefore
sends the following message:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
Search ALTAVISTA malaria and Africa
end
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*** SAMPLE WEB SEARCH RESULTS
When GetWeb receives the message, it forwards the message
to AltaVista.
AltaVista searches the Web and sends a message back to GetWeb.
The message
is then forwarded to Joe.
*** FOLLOW-UP WEB SEARCH
Joe decides that the document titled Malaria Africa [40]
looks promising.
He refers to the bottom of the results message and locates
the [40] with
the corresponding URL (http://www.medguide.org.zm/whodocs/malaafri.htm)
and
prepares a new message to
getweb@usa.healthnet.org
The following command line is included in the body of the
message:
get http://www.medguide.org.zm/whodocs/malaafri.htm
*** RESULTS OF FOLLOW-UP WEB SEARCH
GetWeb then sends back to Joe a message containing the World
Health
Organization's estimated malaria statistics for Sub-Saharan
Africa.
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F. HOTLIST OF RECOMMENDED WEB SITES
A hotlist of URLs which we consider especially interesting
and useful is
available to you. Send an e-mail message to
getweb@usa.healthnet.org,
and
in the text, type:
begin
get file:/help/HOTLIST.html
end
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USING GETWEB: PART 2 - ADVANCED FEATURES
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A. FOLLOWING CHAINS OF LINKED DOCUMENTS
B. BREAKING COMMANDS BETWEEN MULTIPLE LINES
C. SPLITTING MESSAGES
D. REQUESTING A WEB PAGE AS AN HTML SOURCE DOCUMENT
E. BINARY FILES
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A. FOLLOWING CHAINS OF LINKED DOCUMENTS
If you know what link you are going to follow from an intermediate
document, you do not need to download the whole document.
You can instead
use the
FOLLOW command.
Suppose you received a document that looked like this:
Some important conferences carried by SATELLIFE include:
* ProMED: Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases[1]
* ProCAARE: Program for Collaboration Against AIDS[2]
* E-Drug: Essential Drugs[3]
** References from this document **
[1] http://www.healthnet.org/programs/promed.html
[2] http://www.healthnet.org/programs/procaare.html
[3] http://www.healthnet.org/programs/edrug.html
You could then send a message to GetWeb that looked like
this:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get http://www.healthnet.org/programs/ FOLLOW 2
end
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Once the message was received, GetWeb would send you the description
of
ProCAARE.
You can chain together multiple FOLLOW directives. For example,
if you were
to receive the document above, and you already knew that you
were going to
want the fifth document linked to the ProCAARE page, you would
send a
message that looked like this:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get http://www.healthnet.org/programs/ FOLLOW 2 FOLLOW 5
end
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B. BREAKING COMMANDS BETWEEN MULTIPLE LINES
If the URL is too long to fit into a single line, you can
break it up by
surrounding it with angle brackets < > or by ending
the line with a
backslash \.
For example:
GET http://www.yahoo.com/text/Regional/Countries/Czech_Republic/
is the same as
GET <http://www.yahoo.com/text/Regional/Countries/Czech_Republic/>
which is also the same as
GET http://www.yahoo.com/text/Regional/Countries/Czech_Republic/
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C. SPLITTING MESSAGES
If a message is larger than 20 kilobytes (20kb), GetWeb will
automatically
split it into two or more 20kb files, and send each file as
a separate
message. If you would prefer that the messages be split into
files of a
different size, you can add a SPLIT command to your request.
You would type
SPLIT and then the size, in bytes, of the messages as you
would like them
to be sent, at the beginning of each line in which you make
a request.
If you make more than one request, place the SPLIT command
at the beginning
of each request. For example, if you wanted to request two
pages from
HealthNet Web site, and you wanted the information to be sent
to you in
files of 10kb or less, your message would look like this:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
SPLIT 10000 get http://www.healthnet.org
SPLIT 10000 get http://www.healthnet.org/programs/promed.html
end
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If you wanted to do a Web search using Alta Vista on tobacco
and lung
cancer, and you wanted the results of your search to be sent
to you in
files of 40kb or less, your message would look like this:
SPLIT 40000 search ALTAVISTA tobacco "lung cancer"
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D. REQUESTING A WEB PAGE AS AN HTML SOURCE DOCUMENT
If you have a browser which can interpret HTML documents,
you might wish to
download a Web page as an HTML source document. Then, you
could use your
browser to view the page locally, or make it available for
others to do so.
In order to retrieve a Web page as an HTML source document
rather than as
plain text, insert the word SOURCE after the command GET and
before the URL
of the document. For example, if you wanted to receive the
HealthNet home
page as an HTML source document, you would send a message
that looked like
this:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get source http://www.healthnet.org
end
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E. BINARY FILES
If you are using GetWeb to retrieve certain types of electronic
documents,
such as image files, software, files in Word or WordPerfect,
or files which
have been compressed, GetWeb will send these files to you
in binary form.
Unless you specify otherwise, GetWeb will send any binary
message as Base64
MIME file-attach. Like UUEncode, MIME (Multipurpose Internet
Mail
Extension) is a method of encoding binary files into a mailable
text format.
If you would like your binary message to be formatted in
UUEncode, rather
than in MIME, you can use the NOMIME modifier. In order to
retrieve a
binary message formatted in UUEncode, insert the word NOMIME
after the
command GET and before the URL of the document. For example,
if you wanted
to get the zipped copy of the mpack utility in UUEncode format,
you would
send a message that looked like this:
To :getweb@usa.healthnet.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
begin
get NOMIME ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack15d.zip
end
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Please note that there are limits on the number of bytes that
GetWeb will
send.
THE END
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