This online help documents new features in Fresco which have been added since the preparation of the printed manual. Sections added or changed since 1.63, the last major release, are marked by red change bars in the margin. |
This release of Fresco supports frames. Using frames
allows Web authors to have several independent documents
displayed at once in the same browser window: most often, this is
done to allow a collection of navigation buttons to remain in
view even as a longer document is scrolled up and down.
Information about creating Web pages with frames is available from Netscapes Web site or from the W3 Consortium (where the two have disagreed, Fresco has gone with the Netscape interpretation). A couple of example sites that make good use of frames are Channel 4 and Web Pages That Suck. This release of Fresco is unable to print framed pages as a whole, but can print the contents of individual frames. |
This menu option works subtly differently in conjunction with
frames, because each frame contains a separate document: when you
click Menu over a frame and follow Save as HTML, the HTML
you save is just that frames document. To save the top-level
document, the one with the <frameset> tag in, you
should use the save button in the toolbar.
Another change is that users of ANT WebTool can take advantage of it to save out a whole document – the HTML and all the images that go with it (and optionally all the different frames involved too). When doing this, WebTool creates a directory with the saved data in, rather than just a file. You can read more about WebTool on ANTs Web site. |
Many Web pages have large animated advertising banners on, which
can be a waste of bandwidth – in some cases, adding up to
larger than the rest of the page. This version of Fresco can
automatically defer images based on their URL, and some judicious
settings here can greatly reduce time spent downloading adverts.
By default, the blacklist is empty, but you can add to it in
the Network choices dialogue box. Fresco expects a list
of patterns, separated by commas: if an image URL contains any of
those patterns, Fresco will automatically defer its fetching. A
good start would be: Patterns must be just strings; no wildcards are permitted. A deferred image can be loaded by clicking Menu over it and choosing Image->Reload. |
If you use an editor, such as Edit, which requires the OLESupport module in order to handle OLE, you must already have the editor loaded before attempting to perform OLE editing. This restriction does not apply to editors such as Zap and StrongEd which support OLE natively. (If youre wondering why Marcels use of OLE doesnt suffer from this, its all to do with Fresco owning the RunType for HTML files.) |
As well as OLE editing of local HTML pages, this version now
supports editing of pages on remote Web servers. In order to do
this, the Web server must support access by (non-anonymous) FTP
to the directories containing your Web pages. You need to
specify, in the Network choices dialogue box (accessible
from Choices... on the icon bar menu), the Web pages you
which you are allowed to edit i.e the URL as seen by Web browsers
and the FTP path to access them (as seen by FTPclient or Fresco).
For instance, to access Peters home pages on ANTs web server,
he would use Remote editing is started in the same way as local editing: by clicking on the toolbar icon, or pressing Ctrl-E. Fresco will load the HTML into an editor. The filename will be somewhere in your scrap directory, just like when OLE editing of email is started from ANT Marcel. Now whenever you save the HTML file, Fresco will upload it to the server over FTP and then reload it over HTTP (so you see exactly what your readers will see). Example for Demon customersA good example of an ISP who provide free Web pages to their customers is Demon Internet. If you are a Demon Internet customer your Web pages will be located at http://www.your_domain.demon.co.uk/.If you wish to OLE edit these pages with Fresco then you must
as described above) enter Potential problemsThe most common problem is that the upload proceeds but the page that Fresco reloads is still the old version. This most often happens when Fresco is set up to use a proxy server, which may have the old version of the page cached. You should add the name of your Web server to the Domains to exclude setting in the Proxies dialogue box.If an error occurs when attempting to do FTP, check youve got the FTP prefix correct by typing it into Frescos URL line and seeing whether Fresco can access it normally. If you want to edit the top page of a site, you must give
Fresco a URL ending in a slash, e.g. Passwords and security considerationsThe first time you use FTP to upload a Web page, you will be asked for your FTP password. Once you have done this, Fresco remembers it and wont ask you again. If you choose Save users from the icon bar menu, this password will be saved in your passwords file, usually <Fresco$Dir>.Users, and reloaded whenever you restart Fresco.This can be convenient, but be careful of doing it if your FTP password is also used for other things – for instance, a Unix account login. If security is not a problem, for instance on an intranet, you
could avoid having to fill in your password by specifying it in
the FTP prefix, like so: Index pageDirectory fetches, where the URL ends in a slash, usually cause the server to return a file called index.html from the specified directory. Some Web servers, particularly ones running on Windows NT, like to use default.htm instead. If your server is one which doesnt use index.html, youll need to enter the name to use in the Index page box.Pages are activeIf you use SSI (Server-Side Includes), PHP, or other server-side scripting technology, then youll have noticed that whats been described so far is not quite what you want to do. Loading the HTML, as seen by Fresco, into an editor would edit the output of the script, whereas youd like to edit the script itself.Ticking Pages are active will make Fresco fetch the page over FTP before you start editing it, so youll be editing the HTML as seen by the server instead. |
ColoursThe manual describes a Colours dialogue box; these settings have now been moved into the Display options dialogue box. They still work in the same way.In Font choices
In Display optionsDisplay tables / Display frames: These options turn on and off support for frames and tables. This is only really useful to people designing Web pages, who can see how their pages will look on older browsers.In Network choicesWeb publishing: This is described above.Images to defer: This is described above.
Language preference: Some Web servers keep different versions of the same documents at the same URLs but in different languages. A browser can indicate in each request what languages would be preferred, in order of preference. Languages are indicated by two-letter codes, some with extra dialect codes, as described in RFC1766. That document doesnt include a list of language codes, but theres one here (most are obvious, such as en=English, de=German). Dialect codes are often the normal two-letter country codes as seen at the end of domain names (fr=France, my=Burma). For instance, entering cy,en-gb,en here would mean you preferred Welsh, then British English, followed by other forms of English. Sadly, very few Web sites take advantage of this HTTP feature! In Files and cacheKeep history list on exit: Tick this to keep the global history (the one you get to from the icon bar menu) between sessions. |
You can start an editing session |
Display->Frames and Display->Tables: toggle frames
and table support.
Display->Stop animations: stops any GIF animations in the page. An animation can be restarted by reloading it from the cache (choose Image->Reload).
Page->Edit submenu: choose Edit to load the page into a text editor (see OLE editing above), or Open Parent to open a Filer viewer for the directory your local file is in. Obviously, this only works for local pages: ones starting file:. Page->View source: load the page into a text editor. This is not an OLE session, and editing the file will not update the original. However, it provides an easier way to see the source of other peoples pages than clicking Save and dragging to Edit, which was all that earlier versions of Fresco supported. An even easier way is to use the keyboard shortcut, F8. Link submenu: click Menu over a hypertext link, and you can save its destination either as a link (a small HTML fragment containing a link, useful for Web authors) or as itself; you can also add the destination to your hotlist without having to visit it. |
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