This 3.01 beta version of Netscape Navigator and Netscape Navigator Gold fixes reported problems related to some Java applet functionality, HTML calls to device drivers, and a few Macintosh-specific issues. A final version will be available from Netscape in the coming weeks.
This version addresses the following:
These release notes cover:
Other Information:
General Features
Layout Features
Message Composition and Viewing Improvements
MIME Parser Improvements
Macintosh-only Changes
Windows-only Changes
UNIX-only Changes
LiveConnect
JavaScript
Java
Security
International Character Encodings
LiveAudio
Live3D
LiveVideo
QuickTime
CoolTalk
The FRAMEBORDER attribute determines how frame borders are displayed
(outline-3D or plain). The attribute can be set with the value
FRAMEBORDER=YES (outline-3D border) or FRAMEBORDER=NO (plain
border), and can be used in the <FRAMESET> tag or the
<FRAME> tag. The default is FRAMEBORDER=YES. When used in the
<FRAMESET> tag, the FRAMEBORDER attribute sets the default
value for all frames in the frameset. When used in the <FRAME>
tag, the attribute applies only to the particular frame, overriding
any frameset attribute. Because borders are shared between frames, a
border will be plain only if all adjacent frames have their attribute
set FRAMEBORDER=NO.
The BORDER attribute determines the thickness of frame borders for all
frames in a frameset tag. The attribute can be set with a value from
0 to N, and can only be used on the outermost <FRAMESET> (not
on a per-frame basis). For example, setting BORDER=0 positions
adjacent frames with no border space between them, BORDER=3 positions
adjacent frames with 3 pixels of border space between them, and so
on. The default is BORDER=5.
Remember, when neither a FRAMEBORDER or BORDER attribute is specified,
the default is an outline-3D frame with a width of 5. Setting
FRAMEBORDER=NO without a BORDER attribute displays a plain border
with a width of 5. Unless you explicitly specify BORDER=0, a frame
border is displayed.
Note also that when FRAMEBORDER=YES and BORDER is used, the thicker,
outline borders acquire a 3-D appearance.
The BORDERCOLOR attribute determines the color of frame borders. The
attribute can be set with a color name or RGB value, and can be used
in the <FRAMESET> tag or the <FRAME> tag. When used in
the <FRAME> tag, the attribute attempts to set the colors of
the frame's borders. When used in the <FRAMESET> tag, the
attribute attempts to set the colors of all borders of all frames in
the frameset.
Because frame borders are shared, border color conflicts are resolved
as follows: The attribute appearing in the outer <FRAMESET> has
the lowest priority. This is, in turn, overridden by the attribute
used in a nested <FRAMESET> tag. Finally, the BORDERCOLOR
attribute used in a <FRAME> tag overrides all previous
<FRAMESET> tag uses. If there is a conflict for two colors of
equal priority both set on the same edge, the behavior is undefined.
The COLS attribute is mandatory and controls how many columns the
display will be split into. Layout will attempt to flow elements
evenly across the columns to make each column have about the same
height. Unless the WIDTH attribute is specified, column with is
adjusted to fill the available view.
The GUTTER attribute controls the pixels of space between columns. It
defaults to a value of 10.
The WIDTH attribute controls the width of an individual column. All
columns are always the same width, so the overall width of a
multi-column layout is:
The TYPE attribute has three possible values: horizontal,
vertical, and block. These correspond to the three
types of spacing control delineated above. The default value
is horizontal.
The SIZE attribute only applies when the spacer has a type of
horizontal or vertical. Then this attribute controls the absolute
width or height in pixels of the spacing added.
The WIDTH attribute only applies when the spacer is of type block.
Then this attribute controls the absolute width in pixels of the
spacing rectangle added.
The HEIGHT attribute only applies when the spacer is of type block.
Then this attribute controls the absolute height in pixels of the
spacing rectangle added.
The ALIGN attribute only applies when the spacer is of type block.
Then this attribute controls the alignment of the spacing rectangle
in exactly the same way it would control the alignment of an
<IMG> tag.
Netscape now supports underlined text using the <U> tag. The tag
causes all text between the start and end tag to have a solid
underline drawn along the common baseline of the text.
JavaScript evaluation uses the HTML entity
sequence as follows:
< == "<"
Where "&" denotes the start of an entity, and ";" terminates
it. In this case a dynamic entity is in the
form of a JavaScript expression enclosed in curly braces:
&{javascript_expression}; == "returned_string"
JavaScript entities concatenate with the surrounding text:
"&{10 * 10};%" == "100%"
JavaScript entities can only be interpreted on the right-hand
side of HTML attribute name/value pairs.
<FONT FACE="font1,font2,fontN"> </FONT>
For example, if font1 is not available, font2 is used. If no specified
font is available, the default font is used. COLOR and SIZE
attributes can be specified along with the FACE attribute.
<FONT FACE="Garamond,Helvetica,Times"> </FONT>
The bgcolor tag specifies one of the supported color names and
can be used with the following tags: table, td,
th, and tr.
Here's the HTML that produced the table on
the right.
In previous versions, long lines were wrapped at the width of
the window. This gave a "What You See Is What You Get" aspect to
the message composition window. Regardless of whether the sender had
allowed text to auto-wrap, or had hit return at the end of
every line, or had resized the window, the recipient of the
message would see the same line breaks as the sender.
However, problems occurred when senders made their composition windows
very wide for ease of editing. It was
very easy to accidentally send out messages with long lines that
exceeded the 80 column limit. To many recipients, such messages would
be very difficult to read.
In this version, outgoing text is wrapped at 72 columns, regardless of
the size of the window. This makes the composition window less
WYSIWYG, but it does make it much harder to accidentally generate
unreadable messages.
There is (and has been) a single exception to the line wrapping rule:
Lines which have the character > as their first
character are never wrapped. Such lines are usually a part of quoted
text and it is important to preserve the special character at the start of each line.
It is also still true that lines beginning with >
will appear to be wrapped in the Message Composition window if the
lines are longer than the window is wide. This is a property of the
platform-provided text editors. At the time the message is sent,
these lines will be effectively unwrapped.
Since the column at which word-wrapping occurs is no longer tied to
the size of the window, the Wrap Long Lines option has been
added to turn off word-wrapping on the Message Composition window.
This is for the less common case where you need to send a message
with specially-formatted text such as wide tables or charts, or data
where wrapping the lines would damage the data.
When this option is selected, two things happen: First, the text
area no longer does word-wrapping (a horizontal scrollbar will be
presented instead). Second, the generated message will have
exactly the line breaks that the user inserted explicitly and no
automatic wrapping of any kind will occur.
The default for the option is to wrap lines and the option is not
persistent. If you turn wrapping off, the particular composition
window is affected only this one time (since no-wrapping is an
unusual case).
Messages marked as text/plain should have preformatted line
breaks so that the text does not require reformatting or wrapping.
However, two forms of messages cause problems:
First, there are the messages which have line breaks at the end of
each line, but which have lines which are too long (say, 100
character lines rather than 79 character lines.) Such messages were
easy to generate with earlier versions of Netscape by simply making
the Message Composition window wider than its default size.
Second, there are the messages which only have line breaks at the end
of each paragraph. These messages are generated by software which
does not understand the requirements of Internet mail and
inappropriately assumes that the recipient of the message will always
be able to rewrap the messages.
To address both types of message, the Wrap Long Lines option
has been added to the View menu on both the Mail and News
windows. This allows lines which are longer than the width of the
window to be wrapped. Turning this option on will probably make
correctly-formatted messages look worse, however, for messages which
are incorrectly formatted with overly long lines, the option makes
the messages readable.
Note that though there are now line-wrapping options on both the
Message Composition window, and on the Mail and News windows, they do very
different things. The former affects the actual text that will be
mailed out; the latter merely controls the presentation of
received messages without actually altering them.
The MIME message display engine has been significantly improved. A
number of new features have been added and a number of bugs have been
fixed.
In previous versions, uuencoded data was automatically decoded only if
it appeared to be on of the built-in image types (GIF, JPEG, and
XBM); and once the uuencoded data was encountered, it was considered
to extend from the begin line to the end of the message.
This has been fixed:
Netscape does not currently have the ability to generate messages
which contain multipart/alternative data, but it is now
capable of displaying it (for compatibility with existing and future
mailers which do generate such messages.)
However, if the message does not have a Content-Type, then it is
not a MIME message, and we assume that it may contain either text, or
uuencoded data, or BinHex data, or any combination thereof.
So if you come across a message that contains uuencoded data, and we
did not present it as an attachment, then that's probably because
that message was generated by simply pasting the uuencoded data into
the main body of the message with a MIME-compliant mailer.
The proper way to send uuencoded data with a MIME-compliant mailer is
to attach the uuencoded file to the message, so that it shows up as a
MIME part, with some non-text Content-Type, and x-uuencode
as its Content-Transfer-Encoding.
You can find out more at LiveConnect
Developer Information. For further information about
Java-to-plug-in connections and Java-to-JavaScript connections
(including recent JRI/JAVAH changes), choose the Help|Handbook
menu item to find links to latest versions of the JavaScript Guide
and Plug-in Guide.
where
where
The LANGUAGE attribute is mandatory unless the SRC attribute is
present and specifies the scripting language. The SRC attribute is
optional and, if given, specifies a URL that loads the text of a
script. Both attributes may be present.
The SRC attribute specifies the scripting language by using the .js
suffix. The suffix must be mapped by the web server to the MIME type
"application/x-javascript" which the server sends back in the HTTP
GET reply's Content-type: header. Without a properly configured
server (one that maps .js filename suffix to application/x-javascript
MIME), Netscape won't respond properly with the data coming back in
the HTTP response to the SRC-initiated request.
To set NS_ENABLE_TAINT:
Neither taint() nor untaint() modifies its single argument. Rather, both
functions return a marked or unmarked reference to the argument object,
or a copy of the primitive type value (number or boolean value).
JavaScript currently has a global "navigator" object which contains
properties for information not associated with any particular
document. This object now has two additional properties: a
"mimeTypes" object and a "plugins" object.
The mimeTypes object is an array of all MIME types supported by the
client (either internally, via helper apps, or by plug-ins). Each
element of the array is a mimeType object, which has properties for
its type, description, and file extensions.
The plugins object is an array of all plug-ins currently installed on
the client. Each element of the array is a plugin object, which has
properties for its name and description, as well as a subarray of
mimetype objects for the types supported by that plugin.
You may wish to obtain more than one personal certificate. Some web
sites may request (and issue to you) a personal certificate for
specific use with their site. You may also obtain more generic
personal certificates that represent you for credit card transactions
or other nonspecific, secure communications.
Layout Features
(cols * width) + ((cols - 1) *
gutter)
One Color Another Color
One Color Another Color Message Composition and Viewing Improvements
MIME Parser Improvements
Macintosh-only Changes
Windows-only Changes
UNIX-only Changes
LiveConnect
JavaScript
wysiwyg://(id)/
(id)
after the literal 'wysiwyg://' and
before the third '/' is automatically generated.
<NOSCRIPT>...</NOSCRIPT>
tag has been added
so that if a user has JavaScript turned off in the Network|Languages
preferences panel or if a user's browser application does not support
JavaScript, the user sees the HTML between the noscript tag and its
end tag.
<SCRIPT>
tag now has
an additional attribute that allows a JavaScript file to be specified
as the JavaScript source (rather than embedding the JavaScript in the
HTML). Attributes within the SCRIPT tag can now be specified as
follows:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript SRC=mySource.js>
mySource.js
is the URL (relative or full address) of the
JavaScript source code file.
You can use two new functions, taint() and untaint(), to mark and
unmark an argument datum with taint associated with the current
script. For example, to remove taint from a form input element so
that it can be sent to another server by the server's script, you
would say:
untainted = untaint(document.form1.input3)
// now untainted can be sent in a URL or form post by other scripts
Java
Security
International Character Encodings
LiveAudio
Live3D
LiveVideo
QuickTime
CoolTalk
486, 50 MHZ or higher 8 MB RAM
Internet Winsock 1.1 compatible TCP/IP connection
14.4 Kbps or higher network connection
MS Windows 95, MS Windows 3.1 or MS Windows NT 3.51
MS Windows compatible sound card
Microphone which can be connected to the sound card for audio input
Multimedia speakers for audio output.
SunOS 4.1.3 or higher
Solaris 2.3, 2.4
Digital UNIX 3.2 with MME 2.0 (Multimedia Services)
HP/UX 9.0[357] with patches PHKL_6050 and PHSS_6213
These patches are required for driver/kernel changes and the correct Aserver
SGI 5.2
CONFIGURATION AND
MIGRATION
KNOWN
PROBLEMS
wdog.exe /v "path to CoolTalk executable"\cooltalk.exe
http://sample-cgi/program.pl?topic=man§ion=all
is turned into
http://sample-cgi/program.pl?topic=man§ion=all
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