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Archapi Gibraltar Server Comparison (Microsoft Design Document)
Archapi Gibraltar Server Comparison (Microsoft Design Document)
Note: Generally, this project is not being discussed under NDA with any accounts or third parties.
Should you require permission to discuss this with a particular organization outside the company,
please contact the author.
Revision: 0.1
Date: April 12, 1995
Author(s): J. Allard (JAllard)
Document: client.doc
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1. OVERVIEW..................................................................................................................................................
2. REQUIRED CHANGES..............................................................................................................................
HYPERLINK SPECIFICATION.................................................................................................................................
EDIT->PREFERENCES DIALOG REWORK..............................................................................................................
EDIT->GATEWAY CONFIGURATION... DIALOG ADDITION....................................................................................
MENU WORK.......................................................................................................................................................
KILL MULTI-WINDOW MANAGEMENT..................................................................................................................
KILL NEWS READER FUNCTIONALITY..................................................................................................................
KILL HELP->ABOUT->SUPPORT..........................................................................................................................
CHANGE HISTORY CONTROL...............................................................................................................................
MIME........................................................................................................................................................
ADD GOPHERSPACE ADMIN CAPABILITIES..........................................................................................................
CLEANUP ERROR MESSAGES...............................................................................................................................
ADD HELP BUTTONS TO ALL DIALOGS...............................................................................................................
FIX MINIMIZE BEHAVIOR.....................................................................................................................................
CHANGE APPLICATION NAME “MICROSOFT MOSAIC CLIENT”............................................................................
3. RECOMMENDED CHANGES..................................................................................................................
SYNCHRONIZE TOOLBAR W/ O’HARE..................................................................................................................
FIX FILE ACCESS TO URL PATHS..........................................................................................................................
ADD CONTEXT MENU SUPPORT..........................................................................................................................
ADD PERSISTENT CACHING SUPPORT..................................................................................................................
SUPPORT FOR HTML3.0......................................................................................................................................
ADD “KIOSK” MODE...........................................................................................................................................
KILL FILE->PAGE SETUP.....................................................................................................................................
EDIT->VIEW SOURCE..........................................................................................................................................
REPLACE (IMAGE) PLACEHOLDER.....................................................................................................................
PRINT STATUS DIALOG........................................................................................................................................
NEW “SPLASHSCREEN”.......................................................................................................................................
REPLACE SPINNING GLOBE.................................................................................................................................
4. O’HARE CATAPULT ENHANCEMENTS...............................................................................................
5. OPEN ISSUES..............................................................................................................................................
6. REVISION HISTORY.................................................................................................................................
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Microsoft Confidential
1 Overview
This document outlines the changes necessary to the SpyGlass 2.0 codedrop to ship WfW and NT 3.x
clients for Gibraltar. This is not a complete functional specification for the Gibraltar client, it simply
represents the deltas from the SpyGlass 2.0 reference base. You may pick up the SpyGlass 2.0 reference
drop from \\tcpip\spyglass for your reference. The specified functionality will be broken down into
components that the usability group feel must be changed, versus minor changes that would better
represent the quality of the product. This latter section is presented (roughly) in priority order - although
customer feedback should help drive the priorities here. The goal of this document is to present as
complete a view as possible of the required changes to prepare the client for product.
Although the author agrees that investing as little time as possible on “throwaway” code is a good goal, it
should be recognized that the product will be reviewed/perceived based on the quality and functionality of
the client application in many cases. With this in mind, we should consider implementing the most useful,
simple and leveraged non-requirements wherever appropriate. It is assumed that the Win95/O’hare team
is responsible for the “premier” Web browser and future innovations and that they will provide a catapult-
compatible version of their web client compatible with Win95, the NT shell release and future versions of
both products.
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2 Required Changes
This section outlines the changes which the author and usability team agree are necessary to make before
shipping the product.
HyperLink Specification
Motivation: Usability Compliance (necessary for the colorblind/vision impaired)
Work item(s): Make hyperlinks a different font in addition to alternate, underlined color as default
Add checkbox to Edit->Preferences to optionally disable alternate font use (see
Preferences dialog design below)
Change cursor when passing over hyperlinks
Estimated cost:
Notes:
Issue: Do we want to add the ability to configure the duration for visited hyperlinks?
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Edit->Gateway Configuration... Dialog Addition
Motivation: Catapult configuration requirement
Work item(s): Add one new dialog (see notes)
Estimated cost:
Notes: This dialog permits the user to configure and/or discover Microsoft Internet Server
gateway(s) and provide a list of local servers which will be access directly rather than
through the proxy. Pressing the Discover... button will pop up the same dialog used in
the Internet Server admin tool while it goes to the network to discover the server(s). No
defaults will be present in this dialog.
Issue: do we want to retain the ability to go through a CERN-style proxy in this dialog?
Note: this dialog probably needs some additional work
Menu Work
Motivation: O’Hare Compliance, simplification
Work item(s): Delete many items, reposition/rename others (see notes)
Estimated cost:
Notes: The menu structure should look like this:
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The Fonts submenu allows us to get rid of the concept of style sheets in the preferences dialog and
complies with the O’Hare client. We also get rid of Print Setup, Open Local, Cut, Helpers, Home, and all
of the Window menu.
Help
Tools Contents
Back Ctrl+B Index
Forward ----------------------------
------------------------------- About Microsoft Mosaic...
History ð
Favorites ð Global ð Microsoft’s Web Server
Add Favorite Submenu... The WhiteHouse
------------------------------- Lycos Information Server
Add to Favorites Ctrl+D Novell Corp.
-------------------------------
Security ð ü Cache Passwords
Preferences... Clear Password Cache
The Favorites menu will initially have one submenu called Global. The user can add named submenus
through the Add Favorite Submenu option. This permits a user to manage the 100’s of sites they might
visit in some organized fashion. Without the hierarchy, saving favorites would become useless after ~30
items for most users. When more than one Favorites submenu exists, the user will be asked to choose
which submenu to add the favorite to when selecting the Add to Favorites menu option.
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Kill Help->About->Support
Motivation: Microsoft Application Compliance
Work item(s): Remove Help->About->Support button and dialog resources
Estimated cost:
Notes: This just isn’t the way it works in Redmond - if we want to, we can replace with the
common Microsoft System Info dialog, but I don’t really think it’s that important.
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Change History Control
Motivation: Microsoft application compliance
Work item(s): Minor rework of dialog
Provide access to dialog through Alt+Tab
Estimated cost:
Notes:
This dialog adds the ability to add a history item to the favorites list and labels the controls.
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MIME
Motivation: Catapult Compliance
Work item(s): Kill all helper anything in the application
Adapt browser to use MIME APIs and to launch applications based on that
Consider adding a hook to a menu to launch the control panel
MIME control panel development
Estimated cost:
Notes: Per-application helper/MIME configuration is bad
to be specified
means “you need to configure the anonymous user password in your .ini file”.
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Add Help Buttons to all Dialogs
Motivation: Microsoft Application Compliance
Work item(s): File->Open...
File->Save As...
File->Print...
Edit->Find...
Edit->View Source...
Tools->Add Favorites Submenu...
Tools->Preferences...
Estimated cost:
Notes: This also implies adding HelpID’s in dialogs if they are not present for context-sensitive
help.
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3 Recommended changes
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Add Context Menu Support
Motivation: Microsoft application consistency
Work item(s): Add context (right click) menu for links (necessary for gopherspace admin anyway)
Add Copy URL... option
Add Add to Favorites... option
Add Preferences... and Print... options when clicked on document rather than link
Estimated cost:
Notes: The ability to copy a URL to the clipboard to email or store somewhere other than the
favorites list is very important. This implementation is consistent with other Microsoft
applications
Edit->View Source
Motivation: Nice debugging feature for Web server administrators to check the contents of a
document
Work item(s): Add Copy button
Estimated cost:
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Notes: If we do not add a Copy button to this feature (a la Microsoft multimedia titles), we
should just kill it.
New “SplashScreen”
Motivation: Microsoft branding
Work item(s): Replace SpyGlass bitmap
Estimated cost:
Notes: If we opt not to change this, we should kill it. If we don’t do something about the boot
time of the application, it is probably worth considering.
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4 O’hare Catapult enhancements
This section will detail the minor enhancements necessary to make O’Hare “catapult friendly”
To be specified
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5 Open Issues
· Haven’t investigated FTP
· Haven’t investigated Gopher
· Is there Unicode/DBCS work to do?
· Investigate memory usage (e.g., 5.5mb working set?)
· I don’t understand what the Security menu items do on the browser - what are we going to do about
this?
· Need to add the ability to force an item out of catapult cache.... (this could just be a reload?)
· Have not extensively reviewed NCSA Mosaic and NetScape for key features or control
synchronization
· .ini file configuration options not exposed in UI that we should investigate:
· Custom URL menu (useful for pointing to Microsoft resources)
· Document caching
· Image caching
· Anchor visitation horizon (expiry of visited links)
· History expiry
· Temporary directory/kill temp files on exit
· Help file pointer to local HTML file
· Disk cache
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6 Revision history
Version Author Notes
0.1 Jallard Initial draft
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