Help On Mosaic Version 2.2

If you have not used a 2.x version of Mosaic before, you should first read Help On Version 2.0 for an overview of things that have changed since version 1.2.

Version 2.2 includes the following changes from version 2.1:

Known Bugs (No need to report these anymore, we're working on it)

• Mosaic 2.2 clients when dithering inlined images on some monochrome displays will invert the image.
• Mosaic 2.2 clients that have NOT been compiled with direct WAIS enabled will core dump if given a direct wais URL.
• Under some conditions when following a URL with a #name extension Mosaic will ignore the #name extension.
• Empty named anchors are ignored (<A NAME=1></A> is ignored)
• Doing a Close Window on the last Mosaic window causes the client to exit without prompting the user first.

Bug Fixes

• For those with cut & paste problems, white space in front of the URL is now stripped from text entered in the Open URL dialog.
• Fix for the bug added with the GIF89 transparent color support in Mosaic 2.1. This bug caused some GIFs displayed after the first GIF with a transparent background to have improper colors.
• More fixes to possible core dumps when people use TIFF, Sun Raster, or just corrupted GIFs as inlined images.
• Fix core dump caused by using a GIF89 file with multiple images in it as an inlined image. Mosaic now uses the first image in the file as the inlined image.
• Fix bug which sometimes caused spurious flashing on pages viewed immediately after a page that contained form elements. (Thank you X Window System for generating an expose event when calling XtDestroyWidget() on an unmapped Widget)
• Close a socket leak in interrupted document loading.
• Fix bug with whitespace terminated entity escapes.

Improvements

• The latest round of postscript printing improvements from Frans Van Hoesel have finally made it into this version. Thank you Frans for all your patience, it definitely took longer than it should have, and I apoligize for the delay. Changes include:
  • Now prints in helvetica, century schoolbook, or times depending on which font you are displaying.
  • The baseline of all fonts line up vertically (again!)
  • Implements the <hr> (horizontal rule) in postscript output.
• Also courtesy of Frans, there are now 4 more font resources.
  ("Not MORE Fonts!" "Yes, more.")
  In principle I disagree with this, but until someone can show me how you get X to do the equivilent of "Give me a font the same as the current, only in bold", it will have to do. New fonts:
  • Mosaic*fixedboldFont
  • Mosaic*fixeditalicFont
  • Mosaic*plainboldFont
  • Mosaic*plainitalicFont
• Significant speedup in GIF decoding. Thanks to David Koblas who improved his 1990 GIF reading code.
• Improved handling of monochrome displays by dithering inlined images. (Note: This is not guaranteed to improve all images since a dark gray on light gray text image will now become a dithered text on dithered background image)
• Detect monochrome displays automatically so the user need not specify the -mono command line option.
• Addition to the <OPTION> element to support the VALUE tag. As an example, look at the first scrolled list in Fill-Out Form Example #10.
• Add new INPUT type hidden. Hidden inputs don't show up in the document display at all, but their name/value pair will always be included in the submitted form results.
  For another example, see Fill-Out Form Example #13.

• For those who really want their vertical scrollbar on the left the resource Mosaic*verticalScrollOnRight can now be set to False in your X resource file.

New Features - STILL IN BETA TEST!

• Hooks have been placed in this version of Mosaic to allow the use of PEM or PGP encryption, to pass encrypted requests to a server and receive encrypted responses. These hooks are designed to work in conjunction with their counterpart in the NCSA httpd1.1. Special thanks to our hard working server developer Rob McCool who took the time out from httpd1.1 development to place these hooks in the Mosaic client. The new X resources to support these hooks are:
  Mosaic*pemEncrypt
Mosaic*pemDecrypt
Mosaic*pemEntity
Mosaic*pgpEncrypt
Mosaic*pgpDecrypt
Mosaic*pgpEntity
  Note: This is a feature in Beta-Test. No guarantees of security are provided, and the actual final implementation of these features may change. Minimal documentation currently available.
• Mosaic 2.2 supports proxy gateways. A proxy gateway is expected to accept HTTP/1.0 queries that are URLs, the gateway then accesses the URL, and returns the results. This should allow people inside many firewalls to use a proxy gateway to access the outside world. Special thanks to Kevin Altis and Lou Montulli for their work on getting proxy gateway support into Mosaic. For more information see the Proxy Gateways in Mosaic documentation.

Other Information

General information on NCSA Mosaic is available here.