Anchors and Inlines in VRweb

VRweb

Setup

VRweb 1.1 includes WWWAnchor support for Netscape and Mosaic. With command line argument -mosaic, VRweb chooses Mosaic, otherwise it will assume Netscape. In both cases an instance of the web browser must be running to accept requests.

For Netscape, the binary must be found under the name netscape and run on your X-Display, however it does neither has to run on the same machine nor share a file system with VRweb.

For NCSA Mosaic you must select a CCI port number in Menu File/CCI of Mosaic. Enter a port number between 1024 and 65535 and mark the item "select requests". Communication from VRweb to Mosaic will be done through this port, the name of the Mosaic binary does not matter.

The Harmony version supports both WWWAnchor and WWWInline without special settings.

To use a proxy host for WWWinline/Texture requests, specify host:port (e.g. myproxy:8000) via command line argument -proxy or Xattribute proxy. If you are using Netscape, take the values for HTTP Proxy and Port listed under Options | Network Preferences | Proxies | Manual Config | View...


Anchors

Anchors are activated with a double-click or ctrl-click. Whereas ctrl-click works in all modes, double-click is disabled during the fly-to navigation tool to prevent unintended link activation.

A single click on anchors highlights them and shows the description and destination URL in the status line. Click anywhere outside anchors to remove the selection box.

Anchor highlighting can be turned on and off with the Anchors button in the toolbar. It is not necessary to have anchor highlighting turned on to follow links.
Accelerator key: F9.

If you prefer anchor activation with single mouse clicks, disable the option "Enable Motion with Anchors" in the Navigate menu. This causes a single click to follow links while anchors are highlighted.

There are two anchor highlighting methods available: color code and brightness. They can be chosen in the Anchors submenu of the Display menu. Color code draws anchors in a specific color (red-brown) by default, and non-anchors in a shade of grey. Brightness shows anchors brighter than non-anchors.


Inlines

WWWInline nodes are fetched sequentially (on encountering them, can be inside an LOD to defer loading) directly by VRweb via HTTP or via a proxy. Textures are loaded the same way, in case texture mapping is turned on.

The progress indicator of the statusline shows the connection state (connect or transfer) together with the URL of the inlined data, and (if already known) the total size of data to be transferred. The transfer can be interrupted at any time pressing the stop button.

Inline data are gunzipped automatically, redirects are handled, relative URLs are handled properly.

VRweb needs the -URL argument to be able to resolve relative URLs. Only absolute URLs can be handled otherwise. Relative URLs will be searched on the local file system in this case. Any attempt for downloads from the Web can be suppressed with the command line option "-local".


Back to overview.