Computer Networks - Electronic Submission Guidelines

Assignments in this unit may be submitted electronically. Before choosing to submit using this method, you should make sure you understand the following requirments. If your submission doesn't meet the conditions specified in this document, you may find that you do not receive any marks for your assignment.

HTML

Assignments must be written in standard HTML. If you are unable to either write HTML "by hand", or cannot use one of the many authoring tools available, you can not submit your assignment electronically. Note that the requirement for "standard" HTML refers to the HTML 3.2 specification or better. Your document should look similar to an ordinary paper submission, in that it should have your name, student number, and other relevant details given at the top of the document.

Email Submission

Your assignment must be emailed to the special submission address for this subject, cnsubmit@ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au, as a MIME compatible attachment of type text/html. You do not need to understand MIME to do this, but you do need a mail agent which is capable of attaching a document in this way. If you wish to submit with the minimum of fuss, you should probably use Netscape mail. When you "attach" your HTML assignment document to a mail message, Netscape will show a dialogue asking if you want to attach the document as "text" or "as is". You should choose "as is", which should cause the attachment to have MIME type text/html. Note that Netscape version 2 used "attach as source" in this dialogue box, rather than attach "as is". Note also that Netscape 3 Mail has a pair of radio buttons under the "View" menu for "Attachments as links" or "Attachments inline". I don't think it makes any difference which of these you choose, although "Attachments as links" is marginally easier to reply to.

The email address cnsubmit@ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au must not be used as a ordinary address to contact your lecturer or tutor. Mail sent to the submission address is processed automatically by software, which also generates an email reply to inform you that your submission was accepted. We do not actually read this mail until it's time to mark your assignments. For the same reason, it's best not to add any extra text other than the submission itself to the mail message you use to submit your assignment.

If you are unsure as to whether you can submit your assignment successfully, try sending a test HTML message to yourself using Netscape mail to send and read it. It should appear in the mail window (or in the browser window, if "attach as link" was checked, see above) as a formatted document. If it appears as HTML source code (which is notoriously difficult to read :-), you've made a mistake somewhere.

Hyperlinks in HTML

Your assignment submission can contain "hyperlinks" to external documents and images using HREF and IMG HTML markup. If you use information obtained from Internet sites, I would normally expect, as a minimum, for your "references" list to be properly hyperlinked to the original source. For example, if you used a particular Web page, you might have, in your reference list

<A HREF="http://www.sgi.com/">http://www.sgi.com/</a>

If you wish to include images using the IMG in-line image HTML markup, you should ensure that they are referenced as full URLs, not as relative files or URLs. For example, if you have an image in your ~/public_html directory called image.gif, and your login ID is psco99, you should include it as something like:

<IMG SRC="http://ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/~psco99/image.gif">

Your assignment will be read using Netscape version 3 or later, on a computer with an Internet connection, so that references to external documents and pages can (and probably will) be followed. You will receive an email message informing you of the mark you received for the assignment. If you use Netscape mail, it is crucially important that you configure your return address correctly under "Mail and News Preferences". Check it several times - recently some people had incorrect Reply-to addresses which caused great difficulty with the auto-reply software.

Microsoft Word

Under no circumstances will I accept emailed assignment submissions in Microsoft Word format. Submissions in this (or any other proprietory format) will automatically be allocated zero marks. There are several reasons for this:

This subject is all about Open Standards, without which the Internet would not exist. Much as though Microsoft would like us to believe otherwise, a Word document is not in an open standard format. HTML is currently the ONLY universally-agreed standard document format and that is why I specify it for submissions.
Microsoft introduces gratuitous incompatabilities with each new release of Word. If I have not updated to exactly the same version as you, I will probably not be able to read your submission anyway.
I use a Unix computer for nearly all of my work. Neither Microsoft Word nor any compatible word processing package is available for my system. Under certain circumstances I can extract the text-only content of a Word document, but that is all. This is probably not what you want.
I have a philosophical aversion to Microsoft's business practices, and I have chosen not to support them. Microsoft's predatory behaviour (see also here) over the last decade or or has been, in my opinion, inexcusable. In addition, their "Embrace and Extend" philosophy is the greatest threat to the widespread adoption of open standards, on which the future well-being of humankind depends. As the philosopher Edmund Burke once said, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."

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Phil Scott