Recent Questions with Answers

last updated December 5, 1993

Suggestion: You may want to use the Search command under the File menu to quickly locate information in this document.

This document contains answers to questions regarding

Problems using Mosaic

How do I download an image or sound to my machine, rather than viewing or hearing it?

After selecting Load to Local Disk (formerly Binary Transfer Mode) using the Options menu, clicking the mouse button on a hyperlink causes Mosaic to prompt you for a local file save, regardless of the document's file type.

To tell Mosaic that a particular file type should always be written to a file, set its viewer to mosaic-internal-dump with a mailcap file.

Why don't WAIS URL's work?

NCSA Mosaic now offers native wais support, see here for more details (especially the section on Mosaic, WAIS, and Gateways).

Why can't I view .rgb images?

Mosaic may report an error if you access a link that points to an .rgb format image, meaning xv-3.00 is not being used. Since xv-3.00 is now available and can view .rgb files, all you need to do is download xv-3.00 from ftp.cis.upenn.edu in /puv/xv and compile it.

xv-3.00 is shareware for personal use only. Commercial, government, and institutional users must register their copies of xv-3.00.

I can't view a file in format BLARGH via NCSA Mosaic!

See the answer to the question Why don't my multimedia X resources work anymore?

How do I access an ftp site that is missing from Mosaic's list?

To enter an ftp site directly, select Open from the File menu and enter the URL in the text field, for example: ftp://siggraph.org/

Alternatively, you could use this form-based service.

How do I search?

To search the current document for a text string, choose Find In Current (formerly Search) from the File menu.

Other than that, you will only be able to perform a search if the document you are viewing is attached to a searchable index.

If you are running Mosaic with Motif 1.2 or under HP/UX and are having problems with text entry fields (such as those for search keywords), more information is available here.

Even though I'm on an SGI (or a Sun, or an HP), the Audio Annotate menubar entry is greyed out. Why?

Because you don't have /usr/sbin/recordaiff (for SGI) or /usr/demo/SOUND/record (for Sun) or /usr/audio/bin/srecorder (for HP) in place; more information is here.

I can pull down group listings from my news servers but not any actual articles!

Your NNTP server apparently doesn't like to return articles named by message ID -- it will only return articles identified by group and article number. This is very bad, as the URL scheme Mosaic uses can only identify news articles by message ID. Your NNTP server is in violation of the NNTP spec (RFC 977) and should be investigated by your news administrator. (If your admin declares your NNTP server to be properly working, then feel free to send us a bug report, but we'll need read access to your NNTP server to do anything at that point.)

Viewers that run in the background, such as igif, do not work!

This problem usually occurrs on SGIs, where GL programs fork into background processes on startup, by default. To use igif as your gif viewer, simply use the -f flag, by inserting the following line in your mailcap file:

image/gif; igif -f %s Here is more information on mapping MIME types to external viewers.

Questions about Mosaic

Is there a news group or mailing list discussing Mosaic?

Currently, the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www and the mailing list www-talk@info.cern.ch.

Here is more info on World Wide Web

Where can I find Mosaic for a particular system?

The binaries are on NCSA's ftp server, ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, in the directory /Mosaic/Mosaic-binaries. Select the .message file for further information.

Here is information on using Mosaic on other, unsupported systems.

What software (image viewers, sound players, etc.) do I need to support Mosaic?

See the FAQ document, Other Mosaic/WWW Software, under NCSA Mosaic Multimedia Resources.

How do I edit hypertext? (or) Is there an HTML text editor?

See the FAQ document, Other Mosaic/WWW Software, under HTML Converters and Editors

How do I set up a server? (or) How do I provide information to the Web?

 The first-order solution is to simply place the documents you wish to serve on an anonymous ftp server and serve them that way. The corresponding URL would be file://machine.name/directory/filename The advanced solution, for greater performance and flexibility, is to set up an HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server. There are several available; NCSA distributes a public-domain server, at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic/ncsa_httpd, with full online documentation.

The document you'll find most useful in creating your own HTML documents is the Help on HTML document in Mosaic's pull-down help menu.

How do I create the postage stamp images commonly used as hyperlinks to larger images?

The utility xv3.0, used for displaying images, also crops, expands, etc. You can download xv3.0 from export.lcs.mit.edu/contrib and compile it.

Can a Mosaic hotlink run an external application?

Yes, see this document on executing shell scripts inside Mosaic.

Can I put a hypertext link in an annotation?

Yes and no. Since the Annotate menu uses a normal, everyday Motif text widget for entering and editing annotations, there's no fancy hypertext editing capability -- yet.

However, if you understand HTML, you can freely use anchors in your annotation text (since NCSA Mosaic displays annotations as preformatted text, using the <pre> tag, which recognizes anchors). You may want to begin your annotation with the </pre> tag.

Why do you use a layer of indirection for audio annotations? Why not just have the annotation hyperlink point directly at the audio file?

Because then there'd be no way for you to subsequently delete the annotation, using the current scheme of things.

So, you think you've found a bug in Mosaic?

After installing the CERN HTTP daemon, inlined images do not appear:

The CERN HTTP daemon continues to corrupt images and other forms of binary data. The easiest thing to do is to use the NCSA HTTP daemon instead (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic/ncsa_httpd; binaries and source are available), as it will always pass through data unchanged and your images will show up correctly.