Mosaic 2.7b3

Version 2.7b2 help can be found here and version 2.6 here.

The X Mosaic Developers:

SWP - S cott Powers -- Lead Developer
BJS - B rian Swetland -- Design Lead
DXP - D an Pape -- Student Developer
TPR - T ommy Reilly -- Student Developer
PLB - P aul Bleisch -- Student Developer

Jump Points:

About this Release
New Stuff
Bug Fixes
New Resources
Known Bu...Features
Future Enhancements

About this Release:

We know it has been several months since our last release, as many of you have pointed out. ;). The reason is simple: manpower. I, Scott Powers, who was the only Full-Time Employee on the X Mosaic project have moved to develop for the HTTPd team, but I still "lead" the X Mosaic development (and I do a little here and there) which amounts to about 25% of my previous development time. That left 4 students. Brian Swetland is our senior student developer and has been around for a year now, suffice to say he is very familiar with the inner-workings of X Mosaic (Is that a tool bar in 2.7b3?). Dan Pape is next with about 0.9 years on the team, which also puts him in the "very familiar" category (Keep watching, preferences are coming!). Next would be Tommy Reilly who is definitely a rising star in the X group, but still he has only been with us for about a semester now (look for his work with the Right Button Menu in 2.7b3). Last semester, Kristin Buxton was a member of the team and while she did get a little work done, she has moved on this semester. Her replacement is Paul Bleisch, who has come up to speed in a very short time (FTP Put, Mkdir, and Remove). Unfortunately, Dan Pape will be leaving us this semester upon the completion of his legacy to X Mosaic...preferences! Hopefully we will be able to find a suitable replacement for him (BTW, any students at UIUC who want to apply for the job, contact me).

So there you have the short of it. We sincerely apologize for the huge downtime inbetween these releases, but it was simply something that was completely out of our hands. When you have a source base of 100k+ lines of code, it takes a while to bring someone up to the speed of being able to actually get work done. Now, let's get down to it! Oh yeah, please look into the "Future Enhancements" section to find out about a new thing we call "snap shots"!

Just to get this out of the way, right now. Whenever we say there is a release the first question is always: "Are tables supported yet?" In a word, No. They will not be supported until 2.8b2 with an outside shot at 2.8b1. Please refer to "Future Enhancements" for dates on future releases.

Here is the new stuff:

BJS - Tool Bar (detachable)
TPR - Right Button Menu -- Context sensitive -- User-defined sub-menu -- News support -- Image support
BJS - Hotlist support via RBM
PLB - FTP support via RBM
BJS - Body color support (see resources to turn off)
BJS - Base64 and uuencode decoding (If viewing the cartoon newsgroups, you will get to see the cartoon right there on the page) -- Only works if _all_ of the image is in _one_ article [See future release information]
BJS - Replacable globe animation (See http://shire.ncsa.uiuc.edu/p_a/ for more info).
SWP - Privacy mode (You can turn off the referer and agent headers)
BJS - Splash screen
BJS - Load meter reworked
BJS - Ever wanted to know _about_ something? (HINT: about:swetland)
SWP - URL Expansion...you now just type "shire" to go to "http://shire" or "ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu" to goto "ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu". You can change the default protocol to use if you wish (used when the hostname does not begin explicitly with the protocol).
SWP - action=mailto is now supported. When submitting a form via a mailto, you will be prompted whether you want to send the results in. This dialog displays the form results in name/value pairs and eliminates all extra whitespace so you can _see_ what you are submitting and where it is going to.
SWP - Format attribute for use with the mailto action. If you set "format=plain" in your form tag, the message that is mailed is done so in a readable name/value pair format (content-type: text/plain). You can also specify "format=x-url-encoded", but that is the default.
SWP - Border attribute for anchored images is now supported.
SWP - Global history is now in a new format. The change was moving from a readable date to the number of seconds since the birth of Unix. This allows us to "unvisit" links after a 30 day expiration period (this is setable, see the resource section).
BJS - News -- Several bugs swatted, header redesign, group changes work better, meter displays thread status, and URLs are anchored for easy access.
BJS - For better readability, a <td> is translated to a <br> if tables are disabled (the default).
SWP - From now on, when using a PRERELEASE (beta) when you start up Mosaic you will go to the PRERELEASE page. If you hit the Home button, you will be taken to the Home Page you specified (or to the PRERELEASE page).

The BUG fixes:

SWP - Hotlist Name -- The hotlist name was growing by 1 space each time the hotlist was written out. The fix will take care of all extraneous spaces on the hotlist name, this fixing not only new hotlists, but old as well.
SWP - Uncompress and Ungzip have been fixed. To fix this I rewrote the "my_system" routine to search your path for the programs.
SWP - Full path for printing has been abolished. With the fix for my_system above, this became unnecessary. Just "lpr" will work fine now.
SWP - The PNG group requested that the mime type "x-png" be added. Done.
SWP - The annotation server code had an unchecked string compare. This is fixed.
SWP - Got rid of almost all warnings (for gcc) during compile time.
SWP - No proxy now supports the specification of a partial site name.
SWP - If your comment does not end by the end of the file, Mosaic no longer crashes.
SWP - Crashing problem concerning interrupting the initial startup load and then pressing the authentication icon has been fixed.
SWP - FTP Redial now allows you to cancel via the username dialog, password dialog, or by pressing the globe for interruption.
SWP - If you clone or create a new window, the meter and authentication icon will update correctly.
SWP - Proxy and No Proxy will now auto-lower the case for domain names. This fixes the problem of doing a caseless strstr.
SWP - Mosaic now automatically sets the environment variable XKEYSYMDB if you do not have it set already. This should alleviate all key symbol problems.
SWP - The CCI routine "DoCommand" is now fixed. Before it would cause a crash because it was looking for some window information that was invalid.
SWP - Postscript printouts now show the current date on the bottom.
BJS - In accept.c, we now include the sys/filio.h file for SVR4.
BJS - Drag 'N Drop has been turned off to avoid confusion.
SWP - For postscript printing, if the title was NULL, an unchecked strcmp was performed. This has been eliminated.
SWP - The referer field was not being sent. It is now...but only if the refering document is http://. This alleviates the problem of possibly leaking a FTP password.
SWP - File URLs no longer try to FTP on failure. This was causing some weird things to happen.
SWP - Finally, we were able to track down the search crash. This will no longer happen!
SWP - For the proxy stuff...if you do not have the font specified, it will attempt to use "fixed" (looks really tacky) before punting (it used to crash).
SWP - Fixed the file pointer leak in ProcessExternalDirective.
TPR - To cover 99% of all Server Hangs because of the Right Button Menu:
In order to prevent the user from giving the html widget input while stuff is loading (this hangs the server if they press the third button really fast) an InputOnly window is popped up to shield the htmlwidget. This is popped up in _HTMLInput() and popped down in mo_gui_done_with_icon. You can still click on the menus and globe.

New Resources:

BJS - Mosaic*bodyColors: True -- Turns body colors on and off.
SWP - Mosaic*expandUrls: True -- Turns on or off URL expansion.
SWP - Mosaic*expandUrlsWithName: True -- Turns on or off the usage of the first section of the domain name to expand the URL (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu would expand to http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu).
SWP - Mosaic*defaultProtocol: http -- The default protocol to use when "expandUrlsWithName" fails.
SWP - Mosaic*sendAgent: True -- Whether or not to send the Agent header.
SWP - Mosaic*sendReferer: True -- Whether or not to send the Referer header.
SWP - Mosaic*useGamma: False -- Whether or not to use the screen gamma values for PNG.
SWP - Mosaic*screenGamma: 2.2 -- The Gamma value to be used for PNG display.
BJS - Mosaic*IconPixBasename: NULL -- The path and "basename" of the XPMs to replace the Globe animation (if named "icon.1.xpm, icon.2.xpm, ..." in the directory /sam/htdocs/pixmap_anmis/cool, you would use "/sam/htdocs/pixmap_anmis/cool/icon.").
BJS - Mosaic*IconPixCount: 25 -- The number of pixmaps in the animation.
BJS - Mosaic*AcceptLanguage: NULL -- The language to send in the "Accept-Language" header.
TPR - Mosaic*PopupCascadeMappingDelay: 500 -- The delay in milliseconds for popping up the "pull right" menu for the RBM.
SWP - Mosaic*urlExpired: 30 -- The number of days after which a visited link will become un-visited (set to zero, if never).
SWP - Mosaic*historyFile: .mosaic-x-history -- The new history file.
SWP - Mosaic*animateBusyIcon: True -- The busy icon now animates as an hourglass.
SWP - Mosaic*nutTrace: False -- The trace messages for libnut.
SWP - Mosaic*cacheTrace: False -- The trace messages for the cache.
SWP - Mosaic*srcTrace: False -- The trace messages for src.
SWP - Mosaic*cciTrace: False -- The trace messages for CCI.
SWP - Mosaic*htmlwTrace: False -- The trace messages for libhtmlw.
SWP - Mosaic*www2Trace: False -- The trace messages for libwww2.
SWP - Mosaic*httpTrace: False -- The trace messages for HTTP.

Known Bu...Features:

The memory leak. There is one memory leak we are furiously trying to track down. It has been around for quite a while and generally you don't notice unless you leave your Mosaic running for days or if you have a kiosk set up. We are actively searching and hope to have it tracked down for the beta 4 release.
On HP, if you grab the scrollbar and move it slowly down the page, sometimes your screen will get painted with the current HTMLwidget background. We have absolutely no idea what is going on as it does not happen on any other platform. Since we are rewriting the HTMLwidget for 2.8, this should be fixed there. If you use the arrow keys or click the down arrow on the scrollbar, it does not do this.
In extremely rare cases, if you click on a link and immediately start clicking on the right button (to pull up the right button menu), sometimes (again, this has only happened twice since it was "fixed"...and believe me, we have tried) the X server will not receive the button down event... For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about... you will not be able to input anything to your screen nor focus on another window. The only solution is to get on another machine and kill the Mosaic running. Again, this is very rare, but we felt you should be warned so you didn't completely freak out if it happened.
If viewing an image internal OR viewing a Base64 decoded image, you will not be able to save or view external as the image is in memory only (does not exist on your drive anymore).
Currently there is no checking mechanism to make sure the HTML author did not pull a bonehead move and set the text color and background color to the same thing.
Not all external windows display the busy cursor.
On occasion, you will not be able to press the globe to interrupt a download.

All of these features will either be fixed by something new that is being added or the section of code causing the problem is being rewritten. All of these will be taken care of by the 2.8b2 release.

Future Enhancements:

Release Info

Please see http://shire.ncsa.uiuc.edu/release/time.html

All said and done, we feel very good about this release and we feel we have made strides towards our goals. Now that the team is coming together in a more stable fashion (Brian, Paul, Tommy, and I will be working on X Mosaic at least through Fall of next year) the releases will come faster and they will be better.

SPECIAL THANKS TO JASON HABBLEY WHO DESIGNED OUR NEW ICONS!!! THEY ROCK JASON!

Slowly, but surely, the prototype that was X Mosaic is turning into the program it should have been. We realize X Mosaic is behind, but we _are_ catching up. We will shine again.