Help On Version 2.7b5!
If you have accessed this document from the Help On Version menu
selection in NCSA Mosaic, you are using
NCSA Mosaic for X version 2.7b5!
Version 2.7b4 help can be found here
and version 2.6 here.
The current beta, NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b5, can be found here!
The previous beta, NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b4, can be found here!
The current official "final" release, NCSA X Mosaic 2.6, can be found here!
The X Mosaic Developers:
SWP - Scott Powers -- Lead Developer
BJS - Brian Swetland -- Design Lead
DXP - Dan Pape -- Student Developer
TPR - Tommy Reilly -- Student Developer
PLB - Paul Bleisch -- Student Developer
MSL - Mike Lee -- Student Developer
TGL - Tom Lane -- Developer (Off-Site)
In the names above...the first name is a link to their homepage, the second
is a mailto link directly to them.
Jump Points:
About this Release
- New Stuff
- Bug Fixes
- Known Bugs
- Miscellaneous
- Future Enhancements
About this Release:
A long time in the coming...quite a few deadlines passed by...a few choice
comments heard since 2.7b4. All that can be said in response is that software
development is not an easy thing, especially when dealing with a code base
as large and as hacked as X Mosaic.
This comment was made to a fellow developer and he said, "Well why don't you
rewrite it then?" The response was, "We already are."
That's right. You heard correct. 2.8 is a complete rewrite and will be
alpha testing in a couple of weeks. Now that the word is out, know that we
will be supporting HTML 3.2. Completely. 2.8 X Mosaic will astound. Have
no doubts. It already turns heads with the ability to "hot-swap" parsing
rules (e.g. switching from loose HTML parsing to strict...or even completely
switching to a different document type, such as Rich-Text-Format (RTF)) and
style-sheet support.
So you want to know how you can help test this new browser? Well then, you
need to visit the testers page!
New Features
- PLB -- Flush Password Cache
- There is a new menu item (Options->Flush Password Cache)
that allows the user to clear out all cached FTP, Basic
and MD5 Authentication passwords.
- PLB -- All kinds of new news stuff
- News is now PREformatted for display. There is a '>>>' to
show the next article/group in the listings. Newsrc support
should be faster. If there is no newsrc file, a new one is
created the first time the user subscribes to a group.
Right clicking on a newsgroup in the newsgroup listing and
selecting Subscribe/Unsubscribe *actually* does sub/unsub
the group, now. Resources to control the next/previous
article/thread buttons.
Mosaic*newsPrevIsPrevUnread: False
Mosaic*newsNextIsNextUnread: False
Mosaic*newsNoThreadJumping: True
Mosaic*newsNewsrcPrefix: ".newsrc"
Mosaic*newsUseNewsrc: True
Mosaic*SubjectWidth: 40
Mosaic*AuthorWidth: 30
Mosaic*newsUseShortNewsrc: False
- PLB -- Tilde, Tilde, Tilde
- Everywhere there is a file selection dialog, the user can
use the normal ~ notation for their home directory.
- SWP -- Kiosk mode now has a print option
- Kiosk printing is here. Start with the command line param
of -kioskPrint or the resource *kioskPrint and there will
be a print button on the toolbar. Note that you cannot enter
input into the print command text field on the print dialog
to prevent someone from using "lpr; xterm &".
Mosaic*printKiosk: False
- SWP -- News Auto-Scroll
- News will now jump you to your last known position when
properly reading news. What is "properly reading news" you
might ask? Click on the article to read...when you are ready
to go back to the article index, click the index button on
the toolbar. There will be a ">>>" pointer at your last position
and Mosaic will scroll to that point.
- SWP -- Easter Eggs Abound...
- There are a number of hidden things in the binary from the
ftp site...not so many in the source release...
- SWP -- View Source Updates
- Source date is now on the View source dialog and you can also
perform searches on the source dialog now.
- TPR -- Session History on RBM
- You can now have Mosaic*numberOfItemsInRBMHistory number
of items on your RBM session history list.
If you don't want it there...Mosaic*sessionHistoryOnRBM.
Mosaic*numberOfItemsInRBMHistory: 12
Mosaic*sessionHistoryOnRBM: True
- TPR -- RBM Links on the Status Slab
- RBM Links now show up like normal link tracking on the status
slab.
- TPR -- RBM Hotlist Removal
- You can now take the hotlist completely off of the
RBM. Mosaic*hotlistOnRBM.
Mosaic*hotlistOnRBM: True
- SWP -- RBM Hotlist Entry Choice
- You can now decide which hotlist entries you want to have on
your RBM and which you don't.
Start up your hotlist manager and you will see a new button
on it which allows you to add a list or URL to your RBM. You
can also remove it by clicking on this same button.
If you want to add or remove _all_ of your hotlist entries
to/from your RBM, then start up your hotlist manager and then
pull down Navigate from the Menubar and click on Add All Entries
or Remove All Entries.
This is a new file format...so your hotlist file is now
called ".mosaic-hot.html"
- TPR -- Autoconf is here!
- All you people out there who hate Makefiles...autoconf is
here! Pay attention though! You will need to edit the file
"config" to point at your external libraries. Not everything is
supported yet, but most is.
Note...this is for people who want to pull down the source
and compile it (requires Motif).
- DXP -- Image Kill
- Ever frequent a site that has annoying images on it that take
forever to load during high access times?? Ever think, "Man
would it be nice to delay those images for this page or simply
kill them altogether?" Dan heard you.
Make a file called .mosaic-imageselect-sites in your home
directory. # sign lines are comments. Begin a line with
"delay" a space and then a hostname (or part of one). The
images at this host will be delayed. If you use kill, a
blank pixmap will be substituted.
At present this does not encompass images inside a HTML document
only the site at which the HTML document resides. This is under
consideration for 2.8.
See help on image selection.
- SWP -- TITLE in Anchors now the same as SUBJECT
- We now support the TITLE attribute of anchors...we have supported
SUBJECT since we put in mailto support and it is the exact
same action...TITLE becomes the subject of the mailto.
- SWP -- Bullets
- Bullets have now been fixed (you will see them again) and
also enhanced so that they alternate circle/square per level
and those pairs alternate filled/non-filled.
- SWP -- Redirect for proxy support
- When using proxies, you will now receive the redirects
correctly.
- SWP -- A forking problem
- In one of our wait3 calls, we were passing a NULL as the
first parameter when it should have been the address of an
int.
- SWP -- No Proxy...fixed yet again
- The core dump associated with Commiting no proxy additions/
edits has been fixed.
- SWP -- forms -- attribute of hidden or image
- We were only checking for lowercase on a "input" tag with
attributes of hidden or image. We now do a "caseless_equal".
- SWP -- FindIconColor crashing problem
- The problem was that in rare cases the original author of
this function was applying a "-1" to an array index. In this
case now, we set the color asked for to "Black".
- SWP -- HIDDEN form field traversal
- Fixed a problem with traversing form fields that were
hidden type.
- PLB -- FTP Put File Selection Box "Misfeature"
- In previous versions, the FTP put FSB ignored the file
input field (the bottom most field). This is fixed.
- SWP -- MEMORY LEAK!
- Whew...this was a big thing. This particular problem has been
around since the begining of image support (I believe). The
problem is fairly straightforward...Mosaic never released any
of its pixmap resources from the server (until the program exited
or the X server ran out of memory). This was the cause of
kiosks crashing and why it was so hard to track...Mosaic wasn't
using the memory...the X server was.
- SWP -- Kiosk support has been fixed
- With the advent of the toolbar and gui modifications, kiosk
support kinda fell by the wayside. This has now been taken
care of and it is back on its feet.
- SWP -- Link Expiration
- The history file boasted of being able to expire links in
2.7b4 and it did that...only thing was it never updated the
timestamp if you revisited that page. It does so now. So things now expire
30 days after you last visit them, not 30 days after you first visit them.
Mosaic*urlExpired: 30
- SWP -- Fake-Transparent GIF Images
- So what is a "Fake-Transparent GIF Image" you might ask? Simple.
There exist images out there who claim to be transparent,
but really aren't. Since background color support in Mosaic
was added this has generated a core dump as Mosaic would pull
the image out of the cache and try to set color entry 255
to the new transparent background color...of course the image
actually only had 6 colors...a slight memory violation.
- SWP -- GECOS Field Coredump
- On startup, Mosaic tries to fill in your default author e-mail
and author name if you have not set it. It does this by getting
the GECOS field from the passwd file. Beta 4 did not take into
account that some people don't fill in this field...this it
was NULL. Because of this, some people could not even start
up beta 4.
Mosaic*defaultAuthorName: NULL
Mosaic*defaultAuthorEmail: NULL
Mosaic*signature: NULL
- BJS -- Window Cloning
- Fixed all state problems with window cloning.
- SWP -- PNG Bad Images
- PNG bad images were causing a core dump.
- SWP -- Forms have been fixed again.
- Hopefully, for the last time.
- SWP -- Problems with auto-expansion
- You may or may not have experienced the snarfing of port
numbers when using auto-url-expansion. Regardless, it's fixed.
- SWP -- Exposure Optimization
- After spending around 40 hours in 3 days working to optimize
the exposure events when interacting with form widgets I
have come to the conclusion that this is as good as it will
get in the 2.7 code base. 2.8 will be much much better.
- SWP -- Tracker/Status Messages
- We had a binding incorrect that was causing the tracker label to get
cut off...looked like a half "H". No more.
- SWP -- Background Images and Forms
- BG Images and Forms are not a very good mix these days.
2.8 will be flawless in comparison. There is simply too many
things implemented incorrectly to fix.
If anyone out there does happen to come across something
we missed, feel free to submit a patch.
- SWP -- Long-Term Cloned Windows
- Because of the way the current code base is set up, it really
is impossible to keep cloned windows from eventually stepping
on each other's toes. It took me 45 minutes of surfing with
two cloned windows to get a core dump. Other people's mileage
may vary... All I can say is you will love 2.8.
- DXP -- Source clean-up
- I split up mosaic.h into a whole bunch of little .h files,
and I created some new updated dependecies in the
src/Makefile.
Now, things should be a bit more neat, and almost everything
in the src folder is ANSI compatible.
A completely new source base. Become a tester!
NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b5 brought to you by:
=============================================================================
Scott Powers spowers@ncsa.uiuc.edu \
Paul Bleisch bleisch@ncsa.uiuc.edu \ The N.C.S.A. X Mosaic
Tom Lane tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us \ Development Team
Mike Lee ms-lee@uiuc.edu >
Dan Pape dpape@ncsa.uiuc.edu / Comments? Suggestions? Problems?
Tommy Reilly tpreilly@uiuc.edu / mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Brian Swetland swetland@uiuc.edu /
=============================================================================
NCSA X Mosaic Technical Support by:
=============================================================================
Mitch Kutzko mitch@ncsa.uiuc.edu \
Jeff Gerard jgerard@ncsa.uiuc.edu \ The N.C.S.A. X Mosaic
Jason Habbley jhabbley@ncsa.uiuc.edu \ Tech Support Team
Nick Hall nhall@ncsa.uiuc.edu >
Micheal Ringenberg mringenb@ncsa.uiuc.edu / mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Yingxian Wang yingxian@ncsa.uiuc.edu /
Pete Zurich pzurich@ncsa.uiuc.edu /
=============================================================================
Way Cool Imagery Provided By:
Arto Isotalo
http://www.tutech.fi/~ai2375