Exploring the Web with the HotJava(tm) Browser

Exploring the World Wide Web

Exploring the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a vast collection of information stored on computers located all around the world. People have created Web pages that contain information on just about any topic you can think of. You can view these Web pages with a browser such as HotJava^TM. Web pages consist of text, images, audio files, movies, animation, and interactive computer applications called Java applets.

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the language used to create Web pages. HotJava 1.0 supports the latest HTML standard, (currently HTML 3.2), plus many popular HTML extensions.

If you would like to learn more about HTML, see A Beginner's Guide to HTML, provided by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Application).

HotJava Browser Navigation Buttons

The HotJava Browser Navigation buttons provide shortcuts for menu items.

Follow the links below for detailed information about each one, or see the Getting Started Navigation Page for a summary of all the Navigation button functions.

Back   Forward

Home   Reload

Stop   Remember Place

Find in Document   Print

In addition to the standard buttons above, this is an optional button for displaying HTML Errors. You can add this button to your HotJava Browser by choosing Show HTML Errors Button on the Edit-> Preferences->Display page and clicking Apply.

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)

You can visit World Wide Web pages and other places on the Internet by following hypertext links on the current page or by typing in a specific URL in the Place field. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and is the address of a page on the World Wide Web. (See A Beginner's Guide to URLs, a document provided by the NCSA.)

To visit a place on the Internet, click in the Place field, which is normally found in the header or footer of the HotJava Browser window. (Alternatively, choose Edit Place from the Places menu.) Then type the desired URL directly into the Place field and press Return or Enter to display the specified Web page.

If you have chosen not to display the Place field in either the header or footer, choose Go to Place from the Places menu to display a Place field in a separate pop-up window.

The first part of a URL (the part before the ":") is the Internet transfer protocol of the page you are trying to access. This indicates the type of the page and how the browser accesses the page. See the next section ("Supported Protocols") to find out about the different types of URLs that you can use in HotJava.

Supported Protocols

You can use the HotJava Browser to visit Web pages, display documents, send email, and browse GOPHER and FTP sites. In other words, the HotJava Browser supports these major Internet transfer protocols:

http:

This stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, the standard protocol used to access Web pages on the Internet.

To visit a Web page, type:

http://Internet-host/path-to-document

in the Place field and press Return or Enter.

You can omit the http:// portion of the URL if you want; the HotJava Browser will automatically add this for you. For example, these two URL's both take you to the HotJava Browser section of the JavaSoft home page:

http://www.javasoft.com/products/HotJava
www.javasoft.com/products/HotJava

Furthermore, if the URL is a simple name containing only letters, numbers, and hyphens (that is, a name that does not contain any periods, slashes, colons, and so on), HotJava adds www. to the start of the name, and .com to the end of the name. It then adds the http:// to the front of the URL.

For example, if you type sun in the Place field, this gets expanded first to www.sun.com, then to http://www.sun.com, which saves you a lot of typing.

https:

This protocol works just like the http protocol, except that it is used to retrieve documents from a secure server. This means that documents passed between your computer and the secure site are encrypted so that they cannot be read by any other sites, and that no other computer can deceive the HotJava Browser to think that they are the secure site.

NOTE: This protocol does not work in versions of the HotJava Browser that do not support SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

A key appears to the right of the Place field when you're connected to a secure (https) site:

file:

Use this protocol to display a local file. You need to specify the full path name of the file. You can omit the file: portion of the URL if you'd like. For example, both of these URL's display the same file:

file:/mydirectory/myfile.txt
/mydirectory/myfile.txt

If you're loading an ASCII text file, the file must have one of the following extensions:

.text .txt .java .c .cc .c++ .h .pl .el

Note to Windows users:: To access a file on your C (or other) drive, start your URL with the string file:/c:/yourfile or /c:/yourfile.
If you want to list the contents of the C drive, use the URL file:/c:/. or /c:/..
If you type a URL that starts with "c:", you'll get an error message instead of a file listing from drive C. As described above, when a URL starts with a simple text string before a colon, the string is considered to be an Internet transfer protocol. Since HotJava supports locally extensible protocol handlers, you could potentially have a protocol on your system called "c". Therefore, the HotJava Browser must interpret a URL that starts with "c:" as if "c" is a protocol instead of a drive.

ftp:

You can use the HotJava Browser to browse FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. FTP sites are archives of files that you can download across the Internet. If the name of your FTP site starts with "ftp.", you can omit the ftp:// part of the URL; HotJava will automatically add it for you.

When you specify an FTP URL, HotJava displays the directories and files at the FTP site. Click on a directory to go there, or click on a file you want to see. If HotJava recognizes the file type, it displays the file. If HotJava doesn't recognize the file type, it displays a page you can use to save the file locally.

gopher:

Gopher servers are similar to FTP servers, in that they are archives of files. To visit a Gopher site, type in the full URL, or, if the server starts with "gopher.", you can omit the gopher:// portion of the URL.

mailto:

To send email from HotJava, type:

mailto: recipient's-email-address

in the Place field and press Return or Enter. This displays the mail form, in which you can compose your email message and send it. Alternatively, you can choose Send Mail from the File menu to access the mail form.

If you'd like to have the mail form displayed in a separate HotJava Browser window, hold down the Shift key while you press Return or Enter after typing the URL in the Place field. Or, hold down the Shift key while you choose Send Mail.

doc:

You may notice that sometimes the URL for a page displayed by the HotJava Browser starts with doc://. This is a protocol that HotJava uses to locate local HotJava files within the HotJava Browser installation, or, if the file is not found locally, at an alternate location specified by the doc.url property. (See Customizing the HotJava Browser for information about the HotJava properties.)

This protocol is not recognized by other browsers.

Helpful Hints and Shortcuts

To bring up any page in a separate HotJava window, hold down the Shift key while:
- clicking on a link
- choosing a menu item that opens a page
- pressing Return or Enter after typing a URL into the Place field
- double-clicking on a bookmark in the Remembered Places window
Holding down the Shift key tells HotJava to clone itself for the new page.
You can also choose Clone Window from the File menu to create a new HotJava window displaying the current page.
Another way to clone a window is to press the right mouse button over a link or image, then choose Open this Link in New Window or Open this Image in New Window from the pop-up menu that appears.
NOTE: The new HotJava window is part of the current HotJava session, so it does not consume as many system resources as starting a new instance of the HotJava application would. If you clone one or more windows and then change preferences in one window, the changes apply to all the cloned windows since they are all part of the same HotJava session.
To stop fetching a URL, click on the Stop button , choose Stop Loading from the View menu, or start loading another page. This stops the loading of all HTML pages and applets. It does not stop applets that are already loaded from running; it only stops the loading process. If HotJava is making a connection when you click on the Stop button or choose a new page, the connection attempt is completed before loading stops.
To monitor the progress of a page being loaded, use the Progress Monitor. To display the Progress Monitor page in a separate page, hold down the Shift key and click on the miniature Progress Monitor in the upper right corner of HotJava (next to the animated Duke). Or, hold down the Shift key and choose Monitor->Progress from the View menu.
In addition to the Progress Monitor, you can watch the animation of Duke in the upper right corner of the HotJava Browser whenever HotJava is busy loading a page over the network. As long as the animation continues, the page is still being loaded.
- this means HotJava is NOT loading a page over the network.
- this means HotJava IS loading a page over the network.
If an image or applet can't be loaded, you'll see the broken image or applet icon in its place. These icons look like:
for broken image, and for broken applet.
Applet developers: Click on the broken applet icon to see an exception trace to help track down the problem.
To save an image displayed on the current page, press the right mouse button over the image to display the HotJava Commands pop-up menu, then choose Save this Image as....
To resize the areas of a page divided into frames, position your pointer on the edge of a frame (where it borders another frame), press your mouse button down, and drag the pointer. You'll see a line indicating what the new size of the frame will be as you move the pointer. Release your mouse button when the frame is the desired size. You may have to try a couple of times at first to successfully find the edge of the frame, but this will become easy after the first try or two.
Frames are an HTML feature used to divide a page into multiple regions. If a frame (region) can't be completely displayed in its current allocated area, that frame will have one or two scrollbars that you can use to see the contents of the entire frame. An example of a page with frames is the HotJava User's Guide Index, which has two frames -- one small frame at the top, and one large frame at the bottom.
To revisit a page you've visited within the last week, or to minimize typing in the Place field, use HotJava's URL Pool keyboard shortcuts.
HotJava's URL Pool contains all the pages you've visited in the last week, including pages you've visited in other HotJava sessions. The keyboard shortcuts described here are used to access pages in the URL Pool.
To minimize typing in the Place field, type part of a URL and press the Tab key. If only one entry in the URL Pool matches the beginning text you typed, HotJava completes the Place field for you. If there are multiple URLs that match the beginning text, HotJava fills out as much of the URL as it can. You can then finish typing the URL yourself, or you can use the Esc key to display the Completions page. This page contains links to all the possible URL matches.
You can bypass using the Tab key and access the Completions page directly. Type in the first part of a URL in the Place field (for example, type http), then press Esc to display the Completions page. If you want to limit the number of matches on the Completions page, type as much of the URL as you can remember.
Note: You must include the protocol part of the URL (for example, http:// or file:/) for the Tab and Esc features to work.
You can change the amount of time (in hours) that pages are saved in the URL Pool by changing the value of the url.expires property. See Customizing the HotJava Browser for information about how to change properties.
To further minimize typing in the Place field, you can usually skip typing the protocol portion of the URL. In addition, if the name of your URL is in the form http://www.simplename.com, you can just type simplename in the Place field. HotJava fills out the rest of the URL for you. See Supported Protocols for details.
As a shortcut to using the scrollbars, you can use your keyboard up and down arrow keys, the PgUp and PgDn keys to scroll a page at a time, or the Home and End keys to go to the top and bottom of a page.
As a shortcut to choosing items from the menus, use the keyboard accelerators defined to the right of the menu item. For example, type Control-p to display the print dialog. The mouse must be located in the window containing the menu for the accelerator to work. For example, typing Control-f displays the Find in Document dialog if the mouse is in the main HotJava Browser window, and it displays the Add New Folder dialog if the mouse is in the Remembered Places window.
You can easily define your own keyboard accelerators for menu items by editing the HotJava Browser Menu properties. See Customizing the HotJava Browser for information about editing the HotJava Browser properties.
To capture output from Java applets, choose View->Show Console. Alternatively, you can get a log of the HotJava session, either saved to a file or displayed in the window where you started the HotJava Browser, as follows:
- To get a log of the HotJava session on Solaris systems, set the environment variable HOTJAVA_LOG to the name of a file where you wish to capture the output. Or, you can start the HotJava Browser using the command line option -log logfile.
- To get a log of the HotJava session on Windows systems, you must run the command line program hotjava_g.exe to enable logging. If you do not specify a log file with HOTJAVA_LOG or the -log command line option, the logging output goes to the console window where you started the program.

Back to HotJava User's Guide Table of Contents

Continue to Using the HotJava Browser Menus (next topic)

Back	Forward
Home	Reload
Stop	Remember Place
Find in Document	Print