Help for HV - A HTML Viewer for the HP Palmtop Computers

HV is a program that lets you browse through HTML texts.

The help document you are currently reading is such a HTML text.

This help document explains what keys in HV do, what the menus offer, how to configure HV, how indexing in HV works and it explains some commonly used terms.

Press the space bar to see more!


Keys in HV

The Menus

Most of the above functions can also be selected using the Menu. In addition to these commands, a few additional functions can be selected from the menus. These commands are discussed in the following.

File menu

Reload Document reads (downloads) the current document again. This usually only makes sense for non-local documents.

Rebuild Index deletes the current index and creates it again.

Clear History deletes the history, i.e. the list of documents that you visited before the current one. This command may be useful to free some memory.

Shell to DOS opens a DOS shell and you can execute DOS commands while HV is still open. Enter "exit" to return to HV.

Edit menu

(no new items here)

View menu

Goto Page lets you enter a page number and jump directly to a certain page within the current document.

Options menu

Display GIF images toggles whether inline GIF images should be displayed.

Do Tables toggles whether <TABLE> and related tags should be processed or not. These tags are used to create a tabular display of data. Normally, it makes sense to have that feature enabled. However, more and more documents found on the WWW abuse the table tags to format the layout of the page. In these cases, it is often useful to disable the table feature because HV does not display tables in exactly the same way as the most popular browser and those documents are usually designed for that browser only.

Use ISO Latin 1 toggles between the ISO latin 1 character set and the PC character set (page 850). ISO latin 1 is the standard used on the WWW, but some pages created on PCs might use the other character set.

Japanese Decoding... displays a window that lets you choose from different decoding variants: Western selects ISO Latin 1 decoding (default). Automatic tries to automatically decide which decoding should be used. EUC-JP forces EUC decoding and SJIS forces SJIS decoding. See the file JAPANESE.TXT for more details.

Show Links toggles between displaying the function key bar and the currently selected link.

Disconnect WWW/LX only appears when WWW/LX is running and connected to your ISP. By selecting this option, you can close the connection without leaving HV.

The configuration file

You can configure HV for your needs by modifying the file HV.CFG, which must reside in the same directory as HV.EXE. The configuration file is split into so called sections. Each section starts with a section name on a single line enclosed by '[' and ']'. Lines starting with ';' are comments.

The [system] section

The system section contains some general settings for HV:

The [Fonts] section

This section lets you specify the fonts to be used by HV:

The [Docs] section

This section lets you specify special documents:

The [Viewers] section

This section specifies what to do if a non-HTML file is encountered. The action depends on the file extension. Example:
   GIF=C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE %s
If a file with a GIF extension is encountered, the program C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE is started with the file name (%s is replaced by the file name) as an argument. Note that the specified extension has to be upper case. You can specify as many extensions as you like. ATTENTION: while running an external viewer, HV stll remains in memory and needs about 130k. The external viewer can only be started if there is enough remaining memory.

Indexing

When loading a document for the first time, an index is generated. Using an index improves access speed significantly, especially for large documents. The index is placed into two files, so that it has to be computed only once, and if you access a document for a second time, the index is readily available. The index files have the same name as the HTML document but have an .PAG and a .LAB extension.

If, for any reason, one of these index files got corrupted, you can rebuild them any time by choosing Rebuild Index from the File menu.

Indexing takes place in the background. The only thing you will notice while indexing is the text Indexing in the title bar. While indexing, you can still do most operations. Thus, you don't have to wait until indexing is completed.

Glossary

Browser
A browser is a program that lets you browse through a special kind of data. In our case, the special kind of data is hypertext. The browser visualizes the data in a hypertext and lets you move around. HV is such a browser.
HTML
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) provides a simple but very powerful means for representing hypertexts. WWW mainly consists of HTML documents. HTML is basically plain text, with so called tags enclosed in angular brackets that specify special elements, i.e. <em> selects emphasised text.
Hypertext
A hypertext is an extension to a normal text. In addition to the textual data, a hypertext also contains so called links, references to other documents or other places within the same document. In order to read a hypertext, you usually need a special browser.
Inline Images
HTML supports two different ways of integrating an image into the WWW: either a link points to an image (the same way as a link that points to a different piece of the hypertext) or an image is integrated into the current page and floats within the text. The latter is called an inline image.
Internet
The Internet is a worldwide "virtual" computer network. "virtual" because it does not consist of any special kind of hardware (all kinds of hardware are actually used), but of a set of standards that define how data is sent from one place to the other. The most important among these standards are IP (Internet Protocol) and TCP (Transport Control Protocol). IP defines how a packet of data has to look like and how it is transported from the source machine to the destination machine. TCP makes sure that all packets arrive unchanged and puts the packets together in the correct order to one stream of data. Most other Internet standards are based on TCP and IP.
ISP, Internet Service Providers
In order to have access to the documents on theWWW, your palmtop must be connected to the Internet. ISPs offer that service, most of the times using a dial up phone line and a modem.
URL, Uniform Resource Locator
A URL identifies a single document on the WWW. A URL typically looks like: http://host.name.com/my_dir/my_document. The part before the ':' specifies how the document can be retrieved (here: using the HTTP protocol). The part after "//" specifies on what machine the document is located (here: host.name.com) and the rest (here: /my_dir/mydocument) specifies the path and file name of the document.
WWW, the World Wide Web
The WWW is a worldwide distributed hypertext that is built upon the Internet. Each document you see can come from a different machine somewhere on the world. Everybody can contribute new documents and they automatically become part of the WWW.

Limitations

HV does not support any tags apart from the following (and corresponding closing tags): <A> <ADDRESS> <B> <BLOCKQUOTE> <BODY> <BR> <CENTER> <CITE> <CODE> <DD> <DL> <DT> <EM> <FORM> <H1> <H2> <H3> <H4> <HEAD> <HR> <HTML> <I> <IMG> <INPUT> <ISINDEX> <LI> <OL> <OPTION> <P> <PRE> <SELECT> <STRONG> <TABLE> <TD> <TEXTAREA> <TH> <TITLE> <TR> <TT> <U> <UL>

HV does not support any alignment attributes in tags.

HV does not support nested lists of more than three levels.

HV does not support more than one form per page.

HV does not support nested tables.

Image maps (clickable images) are not supported.

URLs can be 512 characters long at most.

TEXTAREAs only support one line of text.

HV supports HTTP, but not S-HTTP (secure HTTP) not any other secure HTTP variants.

A maximum of n inline images can be displayed within one non-local document, where n is the number of cached documents minus one.


Press ESC now, to leave help (and return to the previous document).

Andreas Garzotto, 13-Apr-98