- Will W3C continue its Arena development in the future?
- Other testbed environements are likely to take over Arena's rolewithin W3C, and we do not foresee putting much development resourcesinto Arena at this point. See the first paragraph aboutYggdrasil Computing.
- Arena style sheets do not seem to work asspecified?.
- Arena's support for style sheets has not been keeping up with thespecification, and we encourage you to use some of the other clients that support CSS.
- Why was Arena developed?
- Arena's primary purpose was to be a testbed for new features ofthe web. In the past, we have implemented HTML3 features includingtables and math, style sheets and new graphics formats such asPNG. Also, Arena has been a testing tool for theW3C Reference Library.
- What is a style sheet?
- HTML was not designed to give authors control over the finalpresentation of a document. Fonts, color and volume has been thedomain of the reader/browser. Many authors want to influence the finalpresentation, and many readers would like them to. Style sheetsprovide a way to attache presentation hints to the documents withoutaffecting HTML. This is a much debated issue, and you may want to readmore of thebackgroundmaterial available.
- What is HTML3? HTML 3.2?
- See theW3C resource page on Markup for more on this.
- How do I specify colors in the style sheet mechanism?
- You can either specify colors in hexadecimal RGB values (both 3and 6 acharacter are accepted, e.g. #F0F, or #FF00FF), or using namesthat your window system (i.e. X11) knows.
- Using the new style sheet mechanism I don't seem tobe able to to control the colors accurately, why?
- The style sheet mechanism does not allocate any new colors, butreuses the ones found in the dithering cube. Arena will give you thebest approximation available.
- How do the style sheets cascade?
- The style sheet found in your initial document becomes yourpersonal preferences. It will be applied to other pages, unless theother page has its own style sheet. If so, the two styles will bemerged with preferences given to the latter document. Extra weightscan be added with the "!important" construct. See theCSS specificationfor more on this.
- Why isn't Arena available for my flavor of unix?
- When releasing a new version of Arena, we compile for theplatforms that are easily available (sunos, solaris, linux,sgi). Unfortunately, several popular platforms are not representedthere. We therefore make source code available for porting, and canpoint to binaries that others have compiled.
- How do I prevent Arena from going to www.w3.org each time it starts up?
- Unless instructed otherwise, Arena will fetch the relevant releasepage from the www.w3.org server. It's a useful page (that youalso can reach through the "Help" button), but you may not want to dothis every time. Either, start arena with a URL as an argument(e.g. arena http://www.cern.ch/), or set the environment variableWWW_HOME to a URL (in csh: "setenv WWW_HOME http://www.cern.ch/").
- How do I convert LaTeX maths and tables to HTML3?
- Janne Saarela at CERN has written a translator to do this.It's name ismath2htmland it is freely distributable.
Other translator is written by Marcus Hennecke which only translatestables. It can be retrieved fromStanford. - How can I make HTML 3 <MATH> element start with superscripts or subscripts?
- One should place the base inside the <MATH> element as well. If the font of the base is not correct, you can control it with <T>, <B> and <BT> elements. Example:<MATH><T>base</T><SUP>super</SUP><MATH> is rendered as
- What does the "Bad HTML" message in Arena mean?
- If Arena finds HTML errors in the document, she flags it in theupper right corner. (The number in parenthesis is an internal errorcode,not line number or number of bugs.) In most cases,Arena and other browsers will still be able to show the docuement asintended by the author, but who wants to be seen in cyberspace with abad HTML flag?
- How can I see HTML errors?
- If you want to see - and fix - the errors, press the "Edit"button. Arena will start the editor specified in the EDITORenvironment variable (or using the"-editor <editor>"option). The raw HTML will be inserted in the buffer along with shorterror messages camouflaged as comments. You can set the maximum numberof errors to be flagged using the-badflags option.
After have been through an edit cycle, you will also see theerrors when toggleing the view button.
- How can I edit HTML in Arena?
- Start the editor as described above. Make your changes, save thebuffer, exit the editor and Arena will show you the editeddocument. To save the file, either press the "SaveAs.." button andtype in a file name (no expansions are supported yet), or go into youreditor and save the buffer into the proper filename from there.
- What are thecommand line options?
- How do I run Arena from behind a firewall? Has it beenSOCKSified?
- Arena is not SOCKSified, but the CERN httpd proxy serveris. Therefore, you can get through your firewall bypointingArena to a proxy server running on the inside.
- How does Arena cache documents?
- Currently Arena doesn't cache in memory but uses disk for this. Bydefault, Arena will write fetched documents into/tmp. E.g. http document from CERN's info server will go to/tmp/http/info.cern.ch/... When exiting, Arena will deleteall cached documents and the corresponding directory structure. I.e.,the disk cache is not persistant. Yet.
Also, if you run several Arena processes simultaneously on the samemachine you may want to specify different cache directories as theywill not be able to take advantage of each other's caches. Seecommand line options.
- What X11 resources can be set?
- We are moving away from the platform-specific X11 resources tostyle sheets that can roam the web. For more on how to write a stylesheet, see thedraftspecification. Note that the syntax has changed over time, so makesure you have the latest version of Arena. If you use an earlierversion, see the style sheet examples under the help page.
- What hotkeys does Arena support? Why not<space>?
- Arrow keys will move you around in the current document. Ctrl +arow keys will take you page up/down and forward/backward in history.Also, the following X11 keys are supported: Page Up (XK_Prior), PageDown (XK_Next), Home (XK_Begin) and End (XK_Home).We have not been supporting some of the other common hotkeys(e.g.<space> for Page Down) because this may conflictwith future HTML editing. Enough people have asked for this to make usreconsider.
- Why doesn't index searching, hotlists - or other features - work?
- Arena'a primary purpose is to be a testbed browser. These thingshave been done before, so they're not that exciting.
- How can I specify external viewers?
- Arena supportsmailcap files. If you have a file called.mailcap in your home directory with this line in it:
image/gif; xv %s; quality = 0.95
Arena will display all images using thexv program insteadof inline. Thequality statement is an indicator of how wellthe application is able to display the data type. The HTTP server mayuse this information to determine what format to send to you. Thedefault quality is 0.5.
Arena will also look for other mailcap files that the MAILCAPSenvironment variable points to.
- Help! Arena displays all images externally. What's wrong?
- You have probably declared an external viewer for GIFimages. Arena does not distinguish between inline and "outline"images; if a viewer is defined, it will be used for all images.
- How can I make Arena work with proxies?
- Arena (i.e. the library) reads thehttp_proxyenvironment variable. Usingcsh, you could say
setenv http_proxy http://www4.cern.ch:8000/
This is also described in theCERNhttpd documentation.
- On my sun, Arena can't find any hosts. What's the problem?
- Name resolving. Try using "the other" binary,e.g.arena-sun4-4.1.1-lresolv.bin orarena-sun4-4.1.1.bin.
- Arena comes up in black and white (or grayscale) on my colorscreen. Help!
- There is probably another application hogging the colors. Tryquitting other applications (e.g. Netscape and Mosaic) and restartArena. Or, you can start Arena with the "-cm" command line option(introduced in 0,98).
- I submitted a bug report, but it still isn't fixed. Why?
- We try to answer all reports and indicate a priority/complexityfactor. We do not have the manpower to fix/implement all requests. Butwe hope you enjoy Arena anyway.