HTML.edit ReadMe

HTML.edit ©1994-1996 Murray M. Altheim, Equinox Development, All Rights Reserved.
Please read the Legaleze section under HTML.edit Help for information regarding copyrights, credits and distribution.

Help!
For Help on using HTML.edit, either begin with Welcome to HTML.edit or dive straight into Help Contents. Note that all underlined text in HTML.edit Help is "hypertext", that is, you can click on the text to navigate. Clicking on hypertext URLs attempts to load the URL via your WWW browser. For information on setting up your browser to view HTML documents from HTML.edit, see the Preview menu section. For information on HTML itself, check the HTML Help section.

(To close this Help window, click on its close box, located in the window's upper left corner.)

Availability
Through January 1996*, information on current versions is available from the HTML.edit home page at

   http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/tools/htmledit/HTMLedit.html

Non-beta versions of HTML.edit are distributed worldwide via info-mac, umich and their mirrors. Please email any comments or problems you find with this version to the author at

   murray.altheim@nttc.edu

Please watch for announcements in the newsgroup

   comp.infosystems.www.announce

or contact the author to be added to the HTML.edit announcements mailing list.

NOTES ON HTML.edit:

Also see the section New Features under Help. 

No Usage Restrictions
Please note that I have removed the commercial use restriction on HTML.edit. However, all distribution restrictions, copyright and intellectual property protections remain unchanged. Please see the Legaleze section under Help for more information.

Index View
A new feature is the ability to change the display contents in the Index using the Index popUp menu. The Index can view documents by name, <TITLE>, or path (ie., location). While in View by Document Path, documents that have no set path will be shown in single-quotes, such as

   ‘welcome.html’

as opposed to those that have a path:

   earth:www:welcome.html

While viewing by TITLE, those documents having no TITLE element will be displayed as:

   [untitled]:‘welcome.html’

Note that Index popup menu commands that pertain to document paths are dimmed when viewing the Index by name or title -- you must be viewing by path.

Insert Export String --> Insert Custom Entity
Previous versions allowed the insertion of text strings that were optionally translated upon export into date or time information. These strings were in the form "Abbreviated Date" using curly brackets. This version now uses an SGML entity-style format as the inserted string, such as "&date;" or "&time;".  Existing documents using the curly bracket strings should be changed to the new format using a global replacement to the new format as shown below:

       Old Format                                  New Format
   Short Date              &date;
   Abbreviated Date        &abbrevDate;
   Long Date               &longDate;
   Time                    &time;
   Long Time               &longTime;

Use the Replace command (under the Utility menu) with the options set to "All Occurrences" and "All Documents". If you are transferring documents between versions of HTML.edit, uncheck the option "Translate Entities on Export" on Import/Export Preferences.

Footers
As no definition of a footer exists in HTML, this editor defines a footer as any text following a <!--FOOT--> tag used as a separator, regardless of whether this tag occurs in the Body or Footer text areas of the editor. The separator is an HTML comment, which should be ignored by WWW browsers, and can be modified from the Preferences card. I use this feature to automatically cue HTML.edit to separate out the footer text on imported documents. Modifying the "footer" of many documents is then simplified.

Help
If you are upgrading from a previous version, please check the Installing HTML.edit section in Help, especially if you notice any anomalies with the Futura display font. There is no longer any font suitcase to install. Note that previous versions of HTML.edit included the HTML documents "Mosaic for X version 2.0 Fill-Out Form Support" (courtesy NCSA) and "HTML and SGML" (which is part of Dave Raggett's HTML 3.0 draft). These online documents are now referenced via the Browse Hotlist submenu under the tool palette's Preview menu.

Hotlist Menu
Please note that the current version does not support semicolons on the Hotlist submenu, either in the URL itself or in the displayed menu text.

URL Parsing Bug
My parsing routines for URLs choke on equal signs (ie., "="). This only seems to show up in the Index Anchors/HyperText Links command.

Miscellaneous
The name of the Font menu has been changed to the Style menu. Version 1.7.3 sports a few new key shortcuts that should prove handy. Both Index and Hilight HTML now have an All Headings command.

Ruminations:

• tutorial document
• page wizards
• improved table tools
• improved forms tools
• feature to add named anchors based on header level (outline)
• limit field searching to specific labels; improve search and replace
• make HTML Format menu customizable like Font menu
• fix Index HTML to handle nested lists
• support for RTF translation on import (and export?)
• add Store and Restore Footer Utility feature (as tab-delimited table)
• perform more operations based on label
• set up Image Library similar to hotlist: use anchors
• rewrite more file commands to require less reindexing
• add last modified field (in addition to last saved)
• parse document for balanced elements and produce list of errors (use Index field?)
• somehow Set Filename on Import for multipart documents?
• storage of label as document comment or META content
• global changes via search; mark cards for subsection changes
• bidirectionally translate numerical character references (eg., "#62;" = ">")

Planned for version 1.8:

• SGML-style global and local entity declarations (string literals and SYSTEM)
• better search/replace with more Grep features
• LINK element with 2.0 params (modify Anchor utility)
• add all HTML 2.0 attributes for forms and finish forms Help
• still need to add relative link options on custom entities ("&prev;", "&next;", etc.)
• modify custom entity usage to use LINK tags
• LINK rev=made with email address on prefs
• use labels to create projects to designate "Top of Section" for &top; (&top#label; ?)
• need uniqueness checker on named anchors
• finish up Table Utility and make public

Change History

(1.7.3d192/1.7.3 1996.01.15)
 - fixed text selection bug on search and replace strings in Replace

(1.7.3d191/1.7.3 1996.01.01)
 - fixed overflow bug on import
 - overflow option on imports greater than 60K
 - added overflow checking on structure commands
 - fixed disappearance of Index/Hilight commands on Style menu
 - now uses text selection as TITLE if no current title (will default to first available H1)
 - fixed rename from Index bug
 - Find command now works from Index

(1.7.3d186 1995.11.30)
 - added new Find and Find Again commands (borrowed from 1.8a)
 - modified Replace dialog box and added new functionality (borrowed from 1.8a)
 - fixed style menu bug on simplified tool palette
 - fixed restore prefs bug on export conversion table checkbox mirroring of 
   button on Import/Export Prefs
 - fixed Table of Contents bug when displaying Headers/Footers in Index
 - fixed Restore Preferences bug on not setting indexed flag false on changes
   to 'Show Master Headers/Footers in Index'
 - fixed bug in optional attributes on Anchor Utility
 - removed extraneous Labels stuff from Preferences

(1.7.2d180/1.7.2 1995.10.07)
 - fixed disappearing Index bug

(1.7.1d179/1.7.1 1995.10.04)
 - fixed parsing bug in unHTML
 - fixed bug in Edit menu "Edit Clip Library"
 - checks for AppleScript availability
 - return in URL field containing "://" will attempt to load the URL via the specified browser
 - Note field now part of Help

(1.7.1d178 1995.09.29)
 - fixed bug in choosing "Selected Document..." on URL popUp menu when Index
   is displaying document name
 - fixed problem with remembering locations of Format, Form and Table palettes
 - URL popUp now creates absolute URL for documents with no path
 - increased width of document selection dialog for use with full path
 - moved non-HTML 2.0 styles to "custom" submenu
 - Indexing/Hilighting now aborts on elements not having both open and close tags
 - added Command-Quote: if insertion point, inserts '&quot;',
   if a text selection, surrounds the text with '&quot;[text]&quot;'
 - fixed reselection error in unHTML (Control-Shift-[new element | Delete])

(1.7.1d175/1.7.1b1 1995.09.20)
 - Control-Delete removes surrounding tags (checks tag match; attributes OK)
 - Control-Shift-[key] replaces current surrounding tags with new tags
 - restore now handles previous version Prefs files OK
 - fixed getTEXT bug in date/time entities
 - URLs in HTML.edit Help are now browseable

(1.7.1d173 1995.09.17)
 - added Clip Library Custom HTML Elements
 - added Custom Styles to Font menu and Custom Style Table to HTML Prefs
 - fix for Prefs section-switching bug on Norwegian systems
 - Anchor Utility's HREF popUp: "Add this URL to Hotlist" now works
 - fixed field and button handling on two optional attributes on Anchor Utility (mailbox flag icon)
 - located and fixed bug in Index/Hilight All Headings
 - no longer sets indexed=FALSE on import/export from Preferences
 - fixed ugly way (return-wise) items were being inserted into HEAD

(1.7.1d166 1995.09.11)
 - stop button on Reconvert HTML to Entities progress window now works
 - Remove HTML now also removes attributed list and PRE tags (COMPACT/WIDTH)
 - Remove HTML now also retranslates &lt; &gt; &quot; &amp;
 - fixed problem with inserting custom entities from Utilities popUp menu
 - keyword field now visually differentiated by moving its margin to the right
 - Index/Hilight HTML now handles:
      All Headings, with or without attributes
      Anchors with both NAME and/or HREF
 - added Netscape file creator ("MOSS") to export options

(1.7d165/1.7.0 1995.09.04)
 - added Balloon Help for many Prefs options
 - speeded up transition between Prefs sections
 - added overflow checking on Index
 - final cleanup for release