“The Laser Adventure”

- Converting print material to A Web Site

William DeHaven, Rami Arieli

Published in "Computer in Physics (CIP)" vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 411-414, Sept/Oct 1997

A previous article in this series discusses posting research papers on the World Wide Web (CIP 11:2, 1997, pp133-137).

The posting of longer documents such as books could follow some of the same procedures. However, for long documents we frequently wish to increase the user’s options beyond simply reading the material.

With the interactive capabilities of the Web, users can access to a variety of choices, ranging from simple links to interactive animations.

The article describes our approach to converting text-based instructional material to an interactive Web site.

By using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the Java programming language, we were able to change a textbook into an interactive “adventure”.

The text-to-Web conversion required us to create a suitable new page design, and several other features.

An added challenge was that the original text is in Hebrew, whereas the Web pages are in English.

“Lasers and their Applications”, an introductory course for the high school and college levels, was developed by one of us (RA) at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

The content of the course was published as a book in Hebrew.