help

Help

Using Our Homepage
Internet Clients

What is an Internet Client?
Choosing an Internet Client
Getting or Updating Netscape Navigator
Using Netscape

Using Documents

What is an Internet Document?
Document Layout
Navigating in Documents

Using Our Homepage

Our CTFPHC Home Page is short, containing only a header, brief description, table of contents and footer. It has been formatted for frames. For convenience, we have also put a direct link to our reviews index page. The easiest way to move around is to use the vertical scroll bars on your Internet browser as well as the Navigation bar on the left hand side of your screen. This hyperlinked navigation bar remains constant, and allows you to go to any of the major areas of the site quickly, no matter how "deep" you may have ventured into our site.

Home
The Home button will take you to our Home Page no matter where you may be within the site.

Site Map
This link takes you to the index of the CTFPHC web site. From the site map you can click on any of the headings or subheadings to be taken directly to that area of the site. The overview section provides a brief description of the purpose of the site and an outline of our future plans.

CTFPHC History & Methods
About CTFPHC
This section of the site describes the Purpose, Key Definitions, History, International Profile, Sponsorship, and Membership of the CTFPHC.
Methodology
The recommendations of the Canadian Task Force are highly regarded due to the rigorous methodology employed in generating recommendations. This section of the site describes the CTFPHC methodology, including some of the challenges that arise when developing clinical preventive guidelines, particularly around decision making when evidence is unclear.

CTFPHC Topics and Recommendations
This link, like the direct link on the home page, will take you to the index page for all CTFPHC systematic reviews and recommendations. Once at that page, you will be asked to choose the area of care you are interested in. This is organized by patient characteristic (e.g. age), or by problem type (e.g. psychosocial illness, neoplasms). You will then be taken to a list of reviews under that category. Once a specific review has been selected, you will be asked what format you prefer to view. The formats are: full text of reviews (either in HTML on the CTFPHC site, or in downloadable Adobe .pdf format via link to Health Canada's website); structured abstracts, which synthesize the full review into a 1000-1500 word summary; or summary tables - these will give you a one page summary of the recommendation. Another link has been added to connect you to the reference list of each review.

Quick Tables
These quick reference tables provide our most current recommendations by strength of the recommendation (i.e. DOs and DON’Ts), and are organized alphabetically by condition.

What's New
This link provides access to lists of new reviews, revisions to previous reviews, updated reviews, reviews in progress, new topics, new website links, and recent changes to the CTFPHC website.

Other Resources
This link takes you to a collection of web sites that serve as reference tools to compliment the CTFPHC web site. Here you will find links to general medical information, internet search engines, on-line medical journals, government health organizations, Canadian professional organizations, other evidence based guidelines developers, and a list of all CTFPHC publications to date.

Search
If you want to go directly to a specific topic, selecting this item on the Navigation bar will take you to a screen listing search options that will lead you to the documents you want.

Medical Dictionary
This is an "off site" link to The On-line Medical Dictionary by CancerWEB. Use this link to get definitions of medical terms.

Help
This Help System includes tips and suggestions on how to get started using the Internet, how to work with our website, and how to search for our documents.

Contact Us
This section provides the names, affiliations and contact information for Task Force members and staff, including email links.

Feedback
The feedback page provides links to the CTFPHC Website Evaluation Survey and the CTFPHC Guestbook. The evaluation survey is a way for us to collect information about those who use our site, and provides a forum for user feedback. Our goal is to provide clinical practice guidelines to professional and consumer groups that are both comprehensive, yet easy to put into practice. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping us to achieve this goal. Users of the CTFPHC website are also invited to "sign" our guestbook.

Member Area
The member area is a password-protected area for members of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care.

Home Page Footer
The home page footer section provides copyright considerations, and information about recent updates to the page. An e-mail link to the CTFPHC is also provided.

What is an Internet Client?

If you are reading this on a computer screen, you are using software that displays the document text clearly, allowing you to scroll from the first to the last word on this page. The text has been formatted for Internet, specifically for the World Wide Web. It consists of characters that make up the words you see and other characters that you do not see. Those hidden characters comprise "fields" and "codes" which are interpreted by the computer software as instructions that determine the colour, size, font and layout of the text on the page. More sophisticated codes allow some text to be "tagged" with information about a target location or document so that you are able to use that text as a jumping off point for following a link to related information. The rules that determine what text and codes are allowed in this Internet document are represented by HTML, or Hypertext Mark-up Language. Reading and displaying an HTML document is the work of Internet Client software.

Choosing an Internet Client

Many different Internet Client software packages are capable of viewing World Wide Web (HTML) documents. We recommend use of Netscape Navigator ™ from Netscape Communications Corporation, which is available to University faculty and students at no charge and to the general public at a modest charge. The current version of Netscape (Communicator 4.0.2) supports "frames" and the "Java" programming language, which will the most comprehensive browsing experience for this site.

Getting or Updating Netscape Navigator

Since older versions of Netscape may not work with some of our more complex Web pages, we recommend that you visit the Netscape Web site to obtain or update Netscape Navigator.

Using Netscape

If you use Netscape to seek and browse health-related information, you are unlikely to use all features of the software and you are likely to want to see as much as possible of a document on your computer screen. Here are a few pointers about configuring the Netscape display that we find helpful:

Remove screen clutter by turning off options (Netscape menu item "View") for "Show/Hide Navigation Toolbar", "Show/Hide Location Toolbar", and "Show/Hide Personal Toolbar".

You can further customize Netscape to enhance your browsing experience by changing settings under the "Edit", "Preferences" menu. Online help is available by selecting options from the "Help" menu.

Using Documents

What is an Internet Document

A document is a unit of information defined by common authors or editors, by a title and by a declaration of contents. It is usually unified by a common approach to assembling and describing evidence. When we read paper documents, we have a pretty clear idea of where the document begins, where it ends, and how big it is. We can see the whole thing in front of us. On Internet, there are no such visual cues. We see what is on the screen but it is hard to know how much of the document the screen represents. Moreover, using hypertext to advantage, we may follow "links" within the document and jump to different views of the document. Citations, definitions or different sections of the document may appear on the screen. Indeed, links to targets outside the document can display material from other documents and places on the same screen. We cannot even equate a single computer file with a single document because one document may span several computer files, so that multiple hypertext links must be followed complete the reading of a single document.

Quickly, we lose a sense of the "document". This can be frustrating, even dangerous. Methods used to gather, evaluate and report evidence differ from document to document. Our interpretation and use of that evidence should vary accordingly and we need to know when we leave one document and enter another.

How can you discern "documents" on Internet?

There is a feature of the HTML (hypertext mark-up language) Internet document formatting protocol that can help. When your computer retrieves an HTML file for display on your computer screen, the file includes a "tag" or "field" with a label for the title of the document. Your Internet document browser takes that label and puts it in the title bar (the bar at the top of the "window" in which the document appears on your computer screen; see figure). As you browse from one place to another on Internet, keep an eye on the title bar of your Internet Browser. The title will change from time to time, indicating changes in the files that are being viewed.

Document Layout

We try to be consistent with the general layout and formatting of documents displayed on the CTFPHC site. Each document consists of at least 5 major components, separated by horizontal lines.

Frames
The site is organized into two frames. One frame is the Navigation Bar on the left hand side of the screen. This bar is constant and allows you to easily navigate through the site. The other frame, the right hand side of the screen, contains the actual document, therefore the content of the frame will change as you browse the site.

Title
At the top of the document, you will find the title of the page. Beneath the title, there may be a Contents listing. The links from this list may go to a bookmark within the document or may go to a different document.

Document Body
One or more sections containing the body of the document follow. In the body of most CTFPHC documents, additional small icons may be found. These facilitate quick jumps between related sections of a document. For example: Jump to the table of contents for a document or to a higher level table of contents. Jump to an FTP site with files pertinent to the document. Jump to a search engine or information about searching or special browsers for a project.

Document Footer
The last vertical section of each page displays information about copyright considerations, when the document was last updated, and links to the electronic publisher.

Navigating in Documents

It is easy to lose a sense of where you are in an electronic document. For this reason, most of our documents provide rapid links to and from an outline of documents and document sections. Major headings within documents are marked by an icon (

) which, when selected, will jump to a table of contents for that section. After a little experimentation, you will find that this affords a simple, fast method for navigating an Internet document. You may also choose to use the links in the Navigation bar on the left hand side for extremely fast and simple navigation.

A mini-footer may appear at the bottom of some documents. Its function is to facilitate scrolling through sections of a large document and its buttons take one to the beginning, previous section, next section, last section respectively.