The Assistants

Basic Structure

This gives the minimum structure for your html page. Anansi fills in the Project's name as title for your page. I haven't heard any protests thus far.

For the new webmasters:

1. The title will appear in the window caption of the browser and will also be the default name for bookmarks made by visitors.
2. You can change the title by changing what's between the title tags.
3. Except for the title and the meta tags, everything else should go between the body tags.

Document Colors

The Document Colors Assistent will show the colors as you have choosen them. Only the background image won't be shown, instead you get to see the filename of the image. Black fonts mean there aren't any values choosen yet. That is, unless you made them all black on purpose. Yes, this screencapture is a bit boring.

I understand from users that they don't care much for the Red, Green and Blue spineditors. So I plan to hide it under an advanced section and replace the whole thing with something more similar to the Style tabblade on the Project Manager, which lets you go to the Color Chart immediatly and additionally lets you check if you want to override the browser's default values.

Font Color

There's nothing much to add to what I told about the Document Color Assistant.

Table

If some of these tables look bad, blame it on the browser. Browsers don't like tables with images, even more when you display them in a relatively narrow window. Same story for stylesheet enabled browsers, meaning MSIE at the moment of writing. If you don't set style for tables it will look worse than without a stylesheet. But if you do set a style, it turns out to work incorrectly.

The first screen speaks pretty much for itself. You get to say how many rows and columns you want and in what way it should be centered. if this is all you need, then you're done.

	I always keep forgetting about cellpadding. Here's a quote from the Netscape documentation: By default Netscape 1.1 uses a cell padding of one. Cell padding is the amount of space between the border of the cell and the contents of the cell. Setting a cell padding of zero on a table with borders might look bad because the edges of the text could touch the cell borders.
There's a silimar attribute called cellspacing. I couldn't cramp it in, though I'll will do so in a next version: By default Netscape 1.1 uses a cell spacing of two. For those fussy about the look of their tables, this gives them a little more control. Like it sounds, cell spacing is the amount of space inserted between individual cells in a table.

Here the fun stuff starts! This is a 4 row 5 column table where I demonstrate what the Table Assistant can do for you. Just click the mouse on a cell and drag to other cells to join them. Resetting can be done by going to the previous page.

Cascading Style Sheet Assistant

Please take a look at Master Class Preparation - More about stylesheets.

Spell Checker

Yes, it is available but only for sponsors. There are free third-party alternatives, but it turned out they did not work flawlessly with 100% of the users.

Thesaurus

You have to see this, it's great! There's a freeware thesaurus/ dictionary available on the web by the name of WordWeb. It beats any commercial products as it produces synonyms, antonyms, similars and more. Anansi can work with WordWeb. It's a heavy download but worth it.

For the older versions of Anansi: If you got WordWeb installed, open the file anansi.ini with Notepad and add the following line to the WebManager section:

WordWeb=1

Anansi will now show a Wordweb item under the Assistants entry of the menu bar. Just block the word you want to enter and choose Assistants| Wordweb.

User Defined Tags

User Defined Tags are meant to be used for whatever tags you want to add to Anansi. This can be existing specialised tags I left out, new tags that didn't exist when this version of Anansi was released or combination of tags you use often. The User Defined Tagbar can be activated by pushing the hat and wand button. It works very similar to Netscape's bookmark window. There's probably only one thing thing you should know: for rearranging folders you will sometimes need to shift-drag to prevent items from being inserted in folders.

By right-clicking the mouse you can open the edit-window. The edit window has three sections.

	The New Menu section lets you enter the name for a new menu or if you prefer folder. Append will add the new menu to the bottom. Insert will place it at the current selected position and move all existing menu's one position down.
	The New Tag section will probably the place you'll need the most. Here you enter the tags.
	The Rename section works for boths menu-names and for tags.

File Assembly

This is for the demanding and advanced webmasters. Eventually it will be integrated with the editor and to be used in combination with file include commands and macro extensions. At this moment the File Assembly Assistent is still highly experimental.

The Assembly Assistant is being developed for two purposes:

1. For assembling itemfiles to one sorted listfile. This already works quite well, allthough I'm not completely satisfied myself.
2. For easing maintenance of multiple-version-homepages. I'm a bit stuck in finding a good interface. Ideally the Assembly Assistant should be integrated with some kind of Frames Assistant., but I'm still looking for a promising approach.

An example for making a listfile: Assuming you have reviews of some kind, with filenames like rev-ande.cmp, rev-bert.cmp, rev-zzto.cmp, etc. Then fill in the from and to values of the Assembly Assistant with respectively rev-aaaa.cmp and rev-zzzz.cmp. Or you could split the list by filling in rev-aaa.cmp / rev-mmmm.cmp for the first run and rev-nnnn.cmp / rev-zzzz.cmp for the second run.

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