ANT Application Help - Fresco

Fresco

Release 1.72, dated 27th April 1998

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.

Frames

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.

Fresco avoids having lots of scrollbars on-screen by providing scrollable frames with a scroller widget. Click and drag on the widget to scroll the frame. You can also click and drag on the window background to scroll, much like the way Impression Publisher works.

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.

Save as HTML

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.

Image blacklisting

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:
ad.doubleclick.net,/advertising/,/Banners/,/ads/
which bans a whole site, plus likely-sounding directories on all other sites.

Patterns must be just strings; no wildcards are permitted.

A deferred image can be loaded by clicking Menu over it and choosing Image->Reload.

OLE editing

This release of Fresco supports OLE editing of local pages (ones with URLs starting file:). Clicking on this toolbar icon, or pressing Ctrl-E, will load the HTML of the page into your text editor – and, whenever you save the page, Fresco will automatically reload it. OLE editing works with Zap, StrongEd, or even Edit. This release note was written in an OLE session from Fresco, using Tim Tylers excellent HoTMeaL mode for Zap, which you can get from his Web site.

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.)

Web publishing

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
http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/
as the HTTP prefix, meaning Peter has editing access to all pages starting with that string. Peter would then enter
ftp://peter@www.ant.co.uk/public_html/
as the FTP prefix, as that is the FTP command that would allow Peter access to those pages with FTPclient. Here the peter before the @-sign is Peters FTP login username, and is needed so that Fresco doesnt use anonymous FTP. The public_html at the end is because FTP logs Peter into his home directory on that machine, and his Web pages start in a subdirectory called public_html. Most Unix-based Web servers will be similar.

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 customers

A 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
http://www.your_domain.demon.co.uk/
as the HTTP prefix and ftp://your_domain@homepages.demon.co.uk/
as the FTP prefix. The final slashes are important.

Potential problems

The 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.
http://www.sitename.co.uk/
and not
http://www.sitename.co.uk

Passwords and security considerations

The 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:
ftp://peter:joshua@www.ant.co.uk/~peter/public_html/
Needless to say, joshua is not Peters real password!

Index page

Directory 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 active

If 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.

Other new configuration settings

Colours

The 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

Headings: This release of Fresco can show headings (<H1> and so on) in a different font to the rest of the document. This is common practice in traditional (paper-based) typography: its done, for example, in the ANT Internet Suite manual.

In Display options

Display 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 choices

Web publishing: This is described above.

Images to defer: This is described above.

Netscape compatible headers: Every HTTP request includes a header line identifying the browser (or user agent) making the request. Previous versions of Fresco had an option setting to use either a genuine one similar to ANT Fresco/1.69 (RISC OS 3.50) or one claiming to be Netscape Navigator, thus: Mozilla/2.02 (compatible; ANT Fresco/1.69; RISC OS 3.50)

This was because many sites refused to admit any browser not claiming to be Netscape Navigator. The only reason it was optional, is that ANTs own upgrade pages refuse to admit any browser other than Fresco. However, our Fresco-detection mechanism has improved, and theres now no reason ever to use the genuine header, so the option has been removed.

Advanced users wishing to change which version of Netscape Navigator is being offered, should edit Frescos Messages file (not Config) and change the uahdr entry. If you do this, keep a backup; Fresco may fail to work if its Messages file is corrupted or incorrect.

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 cache

Keep history list on exit: Tick this to keep the global history (the one you get to from the icon bar menu) between sessions.

New toolbar icons

You can start an editing session or turn images on and off from the toolbar. The toolbar icons will now also be greyed out when their functions are unavailable.

New menu items

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).

Display->Set width: although this menu option is still present, and still reformats the page to the width you set, it is quite obsolete, as this version of Fresco will reformat the page whenever you resize the main window.

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.

New hotkeys

Ctrl-E Edit current page (if allowed)
F1 View this online help
Ctrl-F5 Toggle frames support
Shift-Ctrl-F5 Toggle tables support
F8 View source of current page

Other new features

Dragging the URL icon: this isnt really a new feature, its been in Fresco since at least version 1.28, but it was never in the manual and so not many people knew about it. If you drag the URL icon (in Frescos toolbar) to an editor – for instance, Edit or Zap – the URL will be inserted into the file you're editing. This differs from the Saveas->Link menu item, as it inserts just the URL, not a piece of HTML containing a link. If you drag the URL icon to a Filer window, Fresco will save a URL file (filetype &B28) called URL.

URL files (filetype &B28 URL): this is another feature thats always been there but never made it into the manual. Such files are single-line text files containing one URL and nothing else: double-clicking on a URL file launches the URL in the same way as if it were typed into Frescos URL line. URL files are useful for adding Web page links to directories and to the pinboard. (The launching is done by a small utility in the Internet Suite, not by Fresco itself, so you dont need Fresco loaded for it to work. In fact, double-clicking on a URL file will load Fresco first if necessary.)

Resizing Fresco windows: As of version 1.68, Fresco will reformat pages (or framesets) dynamically when you resize the window. Advanced users wishing to change the initial size of Frescos windows, should resize the template MainWindow in Frescos Templates file.

Resize only if Ctrl held down: Some people love Frescos new automatic reformatting, some people hate it. If you hate it, load Frescos Config file into an editor (as described in the manual on page 7-10) and change or add the setting below:
resize.requires.ctrl: Yes
This does just what it says: it makes window resizing in Fresco behave the way it used to, unless you hold down the Ctrl key when resizing the window, in which case you get the new, reformatting, behaviour.

Drag-and-drop of text: As of version 1.71, Fresco supports drag-and-drop of text files into multi-line text fields in forms (the <textarea> tag). At present this works only with multi-line text fields, not with single-line ones. Note that dragging a text file onto anywhere else in a Fresco window will make Fresco load that text file as a new document.


E&OE. © Copyright ANT Limited, 1998. All rights reserved. Last updated 27/Apr/98. PDH.
Fresco is a registered trademark of ANT Limited.