X Mosaic 0.7 released

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 11 Feb 93 21:53:19 -0800


Shazam and kaboom -- beta version 0.7 of NCSA's Motif-based networked
information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby
released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.7.tar.Z

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).
DEC Ultrix.

Binaries for these platforms are available:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.7

More binaries will be supplied as I am able to find other
Motif-configured platforms to use. (Contributions of working binaries
are welcome.) Documentation is available online, but is temporarily
out of date (I'll probably bring it up to date this weekend).

Changes since 0.6 include:

o Annotations!
o Personal only (until smart servers get written).
o Automatic inlining of annotation pointers into documents.
o Annotations automatically persistent across sessions (naturally).
o Annotations are subsequently editable/removable.
o Lots of neat GUI things.
o Underlined anchors! You're gonna love this.
o 0, 1, 2, or 3 underlines for each of unvisited and previously
visited anchor types.
o Solid or dashed underlines for each of unvisited and previously
visited anchor types.
o Application exits when all windows are closed.
o Support for <menu> and <dir>.
o Better support for nested lists (filled bullets, empty bullets,
empty boxes).
o Better selection capabilities:
o Select by character.
o New resource, fancySelections: if true, selections will be
"pretty-printed" when pasted into a normal X window (with
underlined headers, bullets for lists, etc.). This is modifiable
per-window from the menubar also.
o Additional command-line argument: free-standing URL will be used as
home document, and overrides all other specifications (including
WWW_HOME, X resource homeDocument, and -home flag). Is that
enough ways to specify the home document??? :-)
o Additional command-line flag -mono, for getting black&white fallback
X defaults... you mono people out there are gonna have to let me know if
I'm providing a decent set of mono resources. Should there be a
distinction between -mono and -greyscale??
o Middle button button in scrolled lists is now equivalent of
double-clicking with left button.
o Performance enhancement for history window's future list.
o Fix for gopher connection port usage.
o Fix for proper gopher and WAIS document titles.
o Temporary fix to access Supreme Court documents on Cornell Law
School server (if manager of that server is out there, please contact me --
you have a problem).
o Option menu for document title/url display at top of window.
o Cute icons in upper right-hand corner of windows for quick window ID.
o Previous search keyword is trimmed correctly.
o Search keyword remains in text field until search is complete.
o New 'Clear Global History' option (to revert all anchors back to the
unvisited color).
o Fixed bug in hotlist geometry layout.
o Lots of new resources:
o confirmExit
o ghostviewCommand
o mailCommand
o printCommand
o xtermCommand
o globalHistoryFile
o defaultHotlistFile
o personalAnnotationDirectory
o Tabs now behave absolutely properly in preformatted text.
o Fixed premature signal setup causing coredump when ctrl-c was hit
during startup.
o Hotlist is saved every time it's changed, to avoid losing information.
o Busy cursor is used more often, as it should be.
o Better handling of telnet/xterm functions (forked into background;
browser never lands on 'telnet' document).
o Ghostview runs in background now.
o Changed application class name to 'XMosaic' for consistency.
o Minor bugfixes and cleanups.

Although this is beta software, I'm looking more for feedback on
design and functionality than bug reports right now -- down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don't take
the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too. New
releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

Finally, thanks again to everyone who's contributed comments and bug
reports, and please... keep 'em coming.

Cheers,
Marc & Eric

--
Marc Andreessen & Eric Bina
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu, ebina@ncsa.uiuc.edu