Kung Fu Power Tips

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This page should help answer the questions:
What is the browser trying to tell me? Where does that link point to? Can I copy this picture? How do I select text for editing from a web page?

Target Audience: New computer users, people who know very little about web development.

There are three things to look at in a web browser window at any given time, other than the content provided by the page, and these are:

The Address Bar.
The Status Bar
The Cursor

First, the address bar. I mention the Address Bar first because t's at the top of the window. For this page it says something like, "http://www.../.../power_tips/cursor_feedback.php" or something very similar to that, except that I put in "..." in place of some words to make it shorter. The address bar is handled in masterful detail by the files: urls.php, and addressbar.php.

Second, the status bar. The status bar is at the bottom of the window, and a lot of people never pay it the slightest notice. We will return to the Status Bar.

Third, and very importantly, the Cursor. The Cursor is what you see moving on the screen when you move the mouse. It changes shape when it is over different parts of the page.

Observe this picture:

See how the pointy finger is over Bolo's cheek? That is how the browser tells us that there is a link there. Hold your mouse over the picture, and you will see that your cursor stays an arrow, because the little picture above doesn't link to anything, it's a screen shot of this page when the mouse is positioned over the banner link at the bottom of the page. Note that it says, "http://elysium/kfdev/site/inc.images/3amigos.jpg" in the picture's status window. That is because it was captured while it was on my dev server, which has a different name and path than the server you are looking at it on now.

Book 5 - Maintenance
(5.2)

Thus spake the master programmer:

``Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.''

Hold the mouse over the real banner link at the bottom of the page, and see the cursor turn into a pointy finger. That means it's a link, and the status bar (hah! I told you we'd come back to it) tells us that it links to a file on my site named 3amigos.jpg. Click on the link adn a JPEG image will load, showing 3 Kung Fu action figures from Bruce Lee's amazing Enter The Dragon standing in my bathtub.

There is another cursor too, that appears when the mouse is held over text. The I-Beam Cursor. Hold the mouse over the above paragraph, and it will show the I-Beam. Click and drag the mouse over the text, and it will become highlighted, indicating that it is selected. Now Copy (three ways to copy, 1-Hit Control+C, 2-Right-Click, and select Copy, 3-Go to the Edit Menu and select Copy) that text and paste it into a word processor like Microsoft Word, and that text will appear in your document. If you want to get really crazy select the whole page with Control-A, then copy it with Control+C, then switch to Word and paste it with Control-V.

Cool, huh? Different programs will accept different things. Word will paste the whole web page, Notepad will only paste the text and Photoshop will only accept the text after you select the Type tool and click in a document.

K, that's plenty. So ends the Kung-Fu Power Tip for the day.

If you got anything out of this, you might want to read about the address bar.

Addressbar <Cursor feedback> Index Megafux Urls What am mp3 crawl this