Release 3.9 of VMS Mosaic is now available at

    ftp://alpha.wvnet.edu/mosaic/mosaic3_9.zip

VMS Mosaic is a GUI web browser.  It supports HTML V4.0 (including
tables and frames), animated GIFs, cookies, secure connections, etc.
It does not support Java, JavaScript or style sheets.  A C compiler
is required to build it.

The most significant changes in this release are:

1.  Support for SSL certificate verification

2.  Support for UTF-8 encoded ASCII

3.  Improved 24-bit and alpha channel image processing.  Even though
    it is limited to 256 colors per image, Mosaic now does a fairly
    decent job of dealing with complex image transparency.  See
    http://libpng.org/pub/png/png-rgba32.html and
    http://libpng.org/pub/png/pngs-img-bg.html for examples.  The last
    example displays alpha channel transparent images over a transparent
    background image.

4.  Improved ftp support.


The complete list of changes since release 3.8-1:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 o Window title is now updated as soon as <TITLE> is processed
 o Added verification of SSL server certificates
 o Added preference and menu option for SSL certificate verification
 o Added support for HTTP refresh headers
 o Added detection of UTF-8 encoded pages
 o Added support for UTF-8 encoded ASCII characters
 o Added partial support for UTF-8 encoded left/right arrows, dagger,
   em/en dashes, bullet, ellipsis, euro, trademark and quote marks
 o Added native color quantization with Floyd-Steinberg dithering
   for PNG and BMP RGB images 
 o Added support for Version 4 and 5 Windows BMP images
 o Added support for transparent BMP images
 o Added support for inline frames in tables
 o Added preference settings for the hotlist menu's height and width 
 o Changed default hotlist menu height to 502
 o Changed the Document Links scroll window height to 200
 o Added support for "about:blank" for use by Google Groups
 o Added partial support for &Dagger, &euro, &hellip, &mdash and &trade
 o Improved support for &bull, &larr and &rarr
 o Added workaround for bug in the ProFTPD ftp server
 o Added cookieTrace trace option
 o Changed alpha channel transparancy processing to use 24 bit
   color quantization with Floyd-Steinberg dithering 
 o Changed to escape spaces and control characters in URLs
 o Increased the default ftp filename display length to 26
 o Fixed crash caused by background images with very large dimensions
 o Fixed printing of pages with inline frames
 o Fixed problem with username/password prompts on secure pages
 o Fixed problem with form button background color in tables
 o Rewrote and improved performance of ParseMarkType routine
 o Overhauled the ftp support code including many bug fixes
 o Reworked XPM image support using LibXpm version 3.4k code
 o Upgraded PNG library to version 1.0.18
 o Upgraded ZLIB library to version 1.2.3
 o Colorized the FTP toolbar icons
 o Colorized the Error and Question dialog pixmaps
 o Optimized preallocation of memory for markup and formatting elements
 o Added preference settings for markup and element preallocation
 o Restored support for Motif 1.1
 o Cleaned up history file processing
 o Cleaned up mailto code
 o Various bug, memory leak and socket leak fixes
 o Various source reformating and cleanups
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


George Cook
WVNET

George Cook wrote:
> 
> Release 3.9 of VMS Mosaic is now available at
> 
>     ftp://alpha.wvnet.edu/mosaic/mosaic3_9.zip

Thanks for continued improvements... 

I forgot to mention one of my pet peeves.... is there a way to have no
home page ?

I have it set to file://nla0: but it still seems like there is extra
overhead in trying to access the nonexistant page.

Also, another pet peeve: if, while mosaic starts up, I start typing in a
decterm, eventually Mosaic takes focus and any characters I continue to
type are then interpreted as commands (instead of going into the URL
text box) and this causes many random results (including the application
quitting if you type the wrong letters!)


>  o Window title is now updated as soon as <TITLE> is processed

I still would like to see the URL text box updated as soon as you click
on an item.

>  o Added support for inline frames in tables

Cool stuff


>  o Changed to escape spaces and control characters in URLs

I am not sure this is such a great thing. It is sometimes good to see
errors in HTML which generates invalid URLS that contain unescaped characters.


I'll have to keep a reminder to get this and compile it once my system
moves are done.

In article <43CC4200.EDB43D28@teksavvy.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@teksavvy.com> writes:
> George Cook wrote:
>> 
>> Release 3.9 of VMS Mosaic is now available at
>> 
>>     ftp://alpha.wvnet.edu/mosaic/mosaic3_9.zip
> 
> Thanks for continued improvements... 
> 
> I forgot to mention one of my pet peeves.... is there a way to have no
> home page ?
> 
> I have it set to file://nla0: but it still seems like there is extra
> overhead in trying to access the nonexistant page.
 
Try setting it to "about:blank".

> Also, another pet peeve: if, while mosaic starts up, I start typing in a
> decterm, eventually Mosaic takes focus and any characters I continue to
> type are then interpreted as commands (instead of going into the URL
> text box) and this causes many random results (including the application
> quitting if you type the wrong letters!)

If you don't use the hot keys much, then the best solution is to set
the preference HOTKEYS to False.  This will disable all the alphabetic
hot keys; the arrows, tab, etc. will continue to work.

>>  o Window title is now updated as soon as <TITLE> is processed
> 
> I still would like to see the URL text box updated as soon as you click
> on an item.

I'll take another look at this.
 
>>  o Changed to escape spaces and control characters in URLs
> 
> I am not sure this is such a great thing. It is sometimes good to see
> errors in HTML which generates invalid URLS that contain unescaped characters.

There is an enormous amount of crud out there, and most of it is generated
by some of the major web sites.  Ebay in particular is bad about generating
unescaped URLs.  Some of the crap HTML I have to force Mosaic to accept
still makes me feel like smashing my head into a brick wall, but I gave
up worrying about it a long time ago.


George Cook
WVNET