- 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 W3C
Reference 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 a style sheet?
- HTML was not designed to give authors control over the final
presentation of a document. Fonts, color and volume has been the
domain of the reader/browser. Many authors want to influence the final
presentation, and many readers would like them to. Style sheets
provide a way to attache presentation hints to the documents without
affecting HTML. This is a much debated issue, and you may want to read
more of the background
material available.
- 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.
- How do I specify colors in the style sheet mechanism?
- You can either specify colors in hexadecimal RGB values (both 3
and 6 acharacter are accepted, e.g. #F0F, or #FF00FF), or using names
that your window system knows.
- Using the new style sheet mechanism I don't seem to
be able to to control the colors accurately, why?
- The style sheet mechanism do not allocate any new colors, but
reuses the ones found in the dithering cube. Arena will give you the
best approximation available.
- How do the style sheets cascade?
- The style sheet found in your initial document becomes your
personal preferences. It will be applied to other pages, unless the
other page has its own style sheet. If so, the two styles will be
merged with preferences given to the latter document. Currently,
merging means picking the first value found for a particular
parameter. In the future, we want to provide a mechanism for
selectively overriding and blending parameters in the various style
sheets.
- 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/").
- How do I convert LaTeX maths and tables to HTML3?
- Janne Saarela at CERN has written a translator to do this.
It's name is
math2html
and it is freely distributable.
Other translator is written by Marcus Hennecke which only translates
tables. It can be retrieved from Stanford.
- How can I make HTML 3 <MATH> element start with superscripts or
subscripts?
- One should place the base inside the <MATH> element as well.
If the font of the base is not correct, you can control it with <T>,
<B> and <BT> elements. Example:
<MATH><T>base</T><SUP>super</SUP>
<MATH> is rendered as
- 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.
- What are the command line options?
- How do I run Arena 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?
- We are moving away from the platform-specific X121 resources to
style sheets that can roam the web. For a tutorial on writing style
sheets, see the draft
specification. Note that the syntax described there is the one
implemented in version 0.98. If you use an earlier version, see the
style sheet examples under the help page.
- What hotkeys does Arena support? Why not <space>?
- Arrow keys will move you around in the current document. Ctrl +
arow keys will take you page up/down and forward/backward in history.
Also, the following X11 keys are supported: 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, it needs
several additional features (e.g. hotlists), but the manpower we can
spend on this is limited.
- 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.
Arena will also look for other mailcap files that the MAILCAPS
environment variable points to.
- Help! Arena displays all images externally. What's wrong?
- You have probably declared an external viewer for GIF
images. Arena does not distinguish between inline and "outline"
images; if a viewer is defined, it will be used for all images.
- Will Arena source code be available?
- Send an email to arena@w3.org for see the source. There are
restrtrictions on the use of the source, but we're working towards
liberalization.
- 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.
- Arena comes up in black and white (or grayscale) on my color
screen. Help!
- There is probably another application hogging the colors. Try
quitting other applications (e.g. Netscape and Mosaic) and restart
Arena. Or, you can start Arena with the "-cm" command line option
(introduced in 0,98).
- 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@w3.org. 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.