- What's new in 0.95?
- Inline support for JPEG images. Inline viewing of not-inlined
images. Improved history mechanism. Numerous bug fixes. And some refreshingly new bugs.
- Why another browser?
- Arena's primary purpose is to be a testbed implementation of the
evolving HTML3 specification.
Secondary, we want to make a good GUI browser based on the the CERN
common code library. The library provides a common platform which
will ensure future compatibility on the web. Also, if you are a
browser vendor, it will save you time.
- What is HTML3 ?
- To learn more about HTML3 and how it may change the web, take the HTML3 guided tour. Also, a draft DTD
is available. The DTD is normally a few steps ahead of the Arena
implementation.
- Why isn't Arena available for my flavor of unix?
- When releasing a new version of Arena, we compile for the
platforms available in the CERN park of reference machines (hp, sun,
decstations (mips), sgi, ibm rs6000). Unfortunately, several popular
platforms are not represented there. We therefore make source code
available to volunteers for porting, but these platforms will
necessarily be a bit behind. You can find binaries for several more
plaforms in the subdirectories.
- How do I prevent Arena from going to www.w3.org each time it starts up?
- Unless instructed otherwise, Arena will fetch the relevant release
page from the www.w3.org server. It's a useful page (that you
also can reach through the "Help" button), but you may not want to do
this every time. Either, start arena with a URL as an argument
(e.g. arena http://www.cern.ch/), or set the environment variable
WWW_HOME to a URL (in csh: "setenv WWW_HOME http://www.cern.ch/").
- What does the "Bad HTML" message in Arena mean?
- If Arena finds HTML errors in the document, she flags it in the
upper right corner. (The number in parenthesis is an internal error
code, not line number or number of bugs.) In most cases,
Arena and other browsers will still be able to show the docuement as
intended by the author, but who wants to be seen in cyberspace with a
bad HTML flag?
- How can I see HTML errors?
- If you want to see - and fix - the errors, press the "Edit"
button. Arena will start the editor specified in the EDITOR
environment variable (or using the "-editor <editor>"
option). The raw HTML will be inserted in the buffer along with short
error messages camouflaged as comments. You can set the maximum number
of errors to be flagged using the -badflags option.
After have been through an edit cycle, you will also see the
errors when toggleing the view button.
- How can I edit HTML in Arena?
- Start the editor as described above. Make your changes, save the
buffer, exit the editor and Arena will show you the edited
document. To save the file, either press the "SaveAs.." button and
type in a file name (no expansions are supported yet), or go into your
editor and save the buffer into the proper filename from there.
This works, but is fairly crude. We hope to move Arena toward GUI
HTML3 editing, but this will require a couple of weekends.
- What are the command line options?
- How do I run Areana from behind a firewall? Has it been
SOCKSified?
- Arena is not SOCKSified, but the CERN httpd proxy server
is. Therefore, you can get through your firewall by pointing arena to
a proxy server running on the inside.
- How does Arena cache documents?
- Currently Arena doesn't cache in memory but uses disk for this. By
default, Arena will write fetched documents into
/tmp. E.g. http document from CERN's info server will go to
/tmp/http/info.cern.ch/... When exiting, Arena will delete
all cached documents and the corresponding directory structure. I.e.,
the disk cache is not persistant. Yet.
Also, if you run several Arena processes simultaneously on the same
machine you may want to specify different cache directories as they
will not be able to take advantage of each other's caches. See command line options.
- What X11 resources can be set?
- The following font resources have a meaning in Arena: h1font,
h2font, h3font, h4font, labelfont, normalfont, italicfont, boldfont,
bolditalicfont, fixedfont, ifixedfont, bfixedfont, bifixedfont,
symbolfont, subsymbolfont, smallfont
Example: to change the font of the H1 element, edit your resource
file (typically ~/.Xdefaults) to include a line like:
arena.h1font: -*-times-bold-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-103-iso8859-1
In order for the change to take effect, you may need to reload the
resource file (xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults) and restart the
browser.
- What hotkeys does Arena support? Why not <space>?
- Arrow Up/Down keys should work as expected. The same is true for
for Page Up (XK_Prior), Page Down (XK_Next), Home (XK_Begin) and End
(XK_Home). We have not been supporting some of the other common hotkeys
(e.g. <space> for Page Down) because this may conflict
with future HTML editing. Enough people have asked for this to make us
reconsider.
- Why doesn't forms, index searching, hotlists - or other features - work?
- Arena'a primary purpose is to be a testbed to HTML3. In order to
be so, some things need to work (among them forms), while others
(e.g. hotlists) are irrelevant. Arena's secondary purpose is to be a
good general purpose web browser. In order to succed, she needs
several additional features (e.g. hotlists), but the manpower we can
spend on this is limited. Among the things that can be expected are:
forms, multithreading, hotlists, inline jpeg and style sheets.
- How can I specify external viewers?
- Arena supports mailcap files. If you have a file called
.mailcap in your home directory with this line in it:
image/gif; xv %s; quality = 0.95
Arena will display all images using the xv program instead
of inline. The quality statement is an indicator of how well
the application is able to display the data type. The HTTP server may
use this information to determine what format to send to you. The
default quality is 0.5.
- Help! Arena displays all images externally. What's wrong?
- You are probably using an older version of Arena. Upgrade!
- Will Arena source code be available?
- We hope to make the source code available at some point. First,
the code needs to stabilize a bit. Then we need to establish a way of
dealing with incoming patches. We may even have to think about legal
issues.
- How can I make Arena work with proxies?
- Arena (i.e. the library) reads the http_proxy
environment variable. Using csh, you could say
setenv http_proxy="http://www4.cern.ch:8000/"
This is also described in the CERN
httpd documentation.
- On my sun, Arena can't find any hosts. What's the problem?
- Name resolving. Try using "the other" binary,
e.g. arena-sun4-4.1.1-lresolv.bin or arena-sun4-4.1.1.bin.
- I found a bug! How do I report it?
- First, check to see if the bug has been reported. You can get to the
bug list for the version that you are using by pressing "Help". You
may also be told that you need to upgrade.
If you can't find it there, please mail a report to
arena@info.cern.ch. Please remember to state the version of:
arena, your OS and your X11 display.
- I submitted a bug report, but it still isn't fixed. Why?
- We try to answer all reports and indicate a priority/complexity
factor. We do not have the manpower to fix/implement all requests
immediately. But we hope you enjoy Arena anyway.