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The IE 4 WWW Subscriptions Wizard
Part 1 - How you're notified of changes and what (if anything) is downloaded.

The first page of the Wizard controls how you're notified of changes to the subscribed Web site, and how much of the site's content is downloaded to your local disk for offline browsing. Depending on which option you select on this page, different pages will appear when you click the Next > button.


You can tell IE 4 to send you an email message showing the contents of the subscribed page when it's canged.If you choose this option then no pages are automatically downloaded (although any pages you browse manually will be stored in IE4's History cache and thus available for off-line browsing). Choosing this option then clicking Next > will open a Wizard page (right) asking how you want to be notified of changes to the site. IE4 always adds a 'gleam' to the site's icon (in the Subscriptions and Favorites folders) when the site has been updated. Optionally it can also send you an e-mail message telling you that the page has changed. You can specify which address to send the email to.

This option makes IE4 check just the specific page (e.g. www.futurenet.com) that was open in the browser when you created the subscription, and download it if it's changed. No other pages from the site are checked or downloaded. This option is handy when you know that a site advertises changes to its internal content on its opening page ('This site updated 10th October"), or when you've subscribed to an individual page within a site, rather than to the site's opening page. When you're browsing the page in off-line mode, clicking on hyperlinks to pages which haven't been downloaded will cause IE 4 to ask you if you want to go online (i.e. dial up the Internet).
This option controls how many 'levels' of a subscribed site are checked and download to your disk. Setting to high a figure can result in long download times and full disks.This option makes IE check and download other pages from the subscribed site, provided that they're linked to the page you subscribed to via standard hyperlinks. Pressing Next > opens a further Wizard page (right) which lets you choose how much of the site is checked.

Note that you're not deciding how many linked pages will be downloaded, but how many 'linked pages deep' IE4 will go from the subscribed page. Most Web sites have a hierarchic structure, like the diagram above. The opening page (typically a menu page) will contain links to a series of other pages (typically section headings, such as 'sports, entertainment' and so on). These pages are one link away (or 'deep') from the opening page. Each one may contain links to other pages; these other pages are two links deep, and so on ad infinitum. When adding an extra level, remember you can't tell how many pages it's going to add, but that it's likely to add more pages than the previous level did. As with single-page downloads (above), if you're browsing off-line and you click a hyperlink to a page that isn't on your local disk, IE 4 will offer to dial up your Internet connection.


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