Copyright
October 20, 1999
In almost all cases, stuff on the web is copyrighted -
ownership and use legally belongs to some person or entity,
and you are not automatically free to just take it without permission.
Copyright law is somewhat complex, and I'm not a lawyer,
so I'm not going to adress the issue very deeply.
If you want to look into it, I suggest:
The public domain contains all works for which the statutory copyright
period has expired. Consequently, you are free to copy any work that
was first published in the United States more than 75 years ago.
Be aware that there may also be copyright on a specific
performance or rendition of the work; so, for example,
you may not copy a MIDI rendition of Beethoven's 9th Symphony
and redistribute it on your own site. However,
you could sequence your own version...
Knowledge
Basically, you need two kinds of knowledge to build a web site:
how to build it, and subject matter.
Web development
One of the most prominent of phenomena in the rapid growth of the web
has
been that as soon as some people learnt how to put up a web page, they
felt compelled to make it be about 'HTML' and web development in
general.
Admirable though their motives may have been (in some cases),
unfortunately
they rarely understood the topic as well as they seemed to believe.
There's a great deal of misinformation on the web - caveat emptor -
typified by nonsense such as "ALT tags are part of HTML programming"
(doubly wrong).
Moral: stick to authoritative sites like The Web Developer's Virtual Library and W3C.
Other topics
You probably already know much of the subject matter you plan for your
web site, but if not, there's no shortage of sources - again,
with the caveat that you ensure their reliability.
A useful site to know about is EncycloZine,
my own 'encyclopedic portal'.
The goal of this site is to give brief overviews of significant topics,
and provide links to 'best of the best' sites for further details.
Also useful are search engines and
encyclopedias
(both online, CD-ROM, and paper).
Of course, always bear in mind that such content as you may find
is copyrighted so you'll need to re-write the material.
How to Take Free Stuff
How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff Table of Contents
Tools
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