202 lines
11 KiB
HTML
202 lines
11 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
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<HTML>
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<HEAD>
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<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.06 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.30 i486) [Netscape]">
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<TITLE>Graphics Muse
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</TITLE>
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</HEAD>
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<BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#0000FA" VLINK="#FA3333" ALINK="#33CC33">
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<!-- =============================================================
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This Page Designed by Michael J. Hammel.
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Permission to use all graphics and other content for private,
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non-commerical use is granted provided you give me (or the
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original authors/artists) credit for the work.
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CD-ROM distributors and commercial ventures interested in
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providing the Graphics Muse for a fee must contact me,
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Michael J. Hammel (mjhammel@csn.net), for permission.
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============================================================= !--><A NAME="musings"></A>
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<TABLE>
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<TR>
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<TD>
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<H2>
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More...</H2>
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<IMG SRC="../gx/hammel/musings.gif" ALT="Musings" HEIGHT=52 WIDTH=247 ALIGN=LEFT></TD>
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</TR>
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</TABLE>
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<TABLE WIDTH="100%" >
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<TR>
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<TD ALIGN=RIGHT WIDTH="100%"><FONT SIZE=-2>© 1998 <A HREF="mailto:mjhammel@csn.net">Michael
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J. Hammel</A></FONT></TD>
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</TR>
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<TR>
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<TD VALIGN=TOP BGCOLOR="#000000" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><IMG SRC="../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif" ALT="indent" ALIGN=LEFT></TD>
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</TR>
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</TABLE>
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<B>A few notes on some of the other widgets:</B>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><I>Notepads</I> are just TextArea form elements. You
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can drag these but you have to click on the NotePads title - you can't
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drag from the textarea or its scrollbar.
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<P><I>News boxes </I>are interesting. You can add HTML tags to the
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title too, but breaks will cause part of the title to go unnoticed without
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some font specification. Also there are 4 navigational aides on the
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4 corners of the news box. If you place the mouse over the Go aide
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(upper left corner) the scrolling in the news box increases. On the
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lower left corner, the Stop aide will slow and eventually stop the scrolling.
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The Up and Down aides move the news text by small increments.</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<BLOCKQUOTE>There is a <I>digital clock </I>which you can set the background
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color for, but it seems to fill a box around the clock, not the the background
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of the clock itself. There is also a <I>date widget </I>which is
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just some colored text of a user-specified size (you can't specify the
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font, however).
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<P><I>Toolbar items</I> can be added to the toolbar after the toolbar is
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created. A <I>Toolbar</I> is just another name for a menu bar with
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icons. Its not obvious, but there are two links in the widget dialog for
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Toolbars - one for the toolbar itself and right below that is one for adding
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individual toolbar items (yes, its actually says "Item" but it all looks
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like one link).</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<I>Bug: Adding a menu item appeared to lock up the browser.
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Top reported the application was asleep an using >50% of my 64Mb of memory
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at that point.</I>
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<BLOCKQUOTE>Be careful about adding a Toolbar if you have other items at
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the top of the page already - you can't move the menu bar and if something
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is underneath it that item can't be dragged to a new location because the
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menu will be placed over the other item.
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<P>The <I>mouselink</I> widget can be confusing. You don't click
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on the small tab widget - this is the default image and looks much like
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the drawer widget - but instead have to grab the pop up image! You
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won't see the image until you place the mouse of the mouselink widget,
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but once you do the image stays visible. This is a JavaScript onMouseOver
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event without any leave event attached to it to clear the image.
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You need to add that by hand.
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<P><I>Tables</I> are accessible from the Text pull down menu (not from
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the Widget dialog) because they expect you'll be filling the table with
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text (although you can place HTML code in them too). Unfortunately,
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if you specify a table that will be larger than the default VDHMTL Main
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Window you won't get any scrollbars to access all the rows and/or columns.
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Worse, you can't resize the Main Window! Moral: use small tables
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and edit it by hand later.</BLOCKQUOTE>
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Not all widgets are available from the Widgets dialog. The table
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widget we just mentioned. There is a Channel Widget available from
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the Channels pull-down menu in the main VDHTML window. I'm not sure
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what this is for, however. The default URL for the image to use for
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this widget didn't resolve so I can't show an image of the default here.
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<P>You can tell the VDHTML has a way to go yet when you realize that there
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is no way to remove an widget from the preview window. I tried dragging
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them out of the window but that didn't seem to work. It just seems
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to move the widget to an offscreen area but leaves it on the page.
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You can prove this by dragging the default plug-in widget off the bottom
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of the browser window. When the page reloads you will still get notices
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about needing a Shockwave plug-in (which for Linux does not exist to my
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knowledge) even though you thought you removed the widget which had previously
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required it.And there is no menu option for removing these widgets from
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the Main Window either.
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<P>An interesting side effect showed up when I tried to use a <I>preferences</I>
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widget, which is just a pop down menu. I then used that menu to select
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"Reload Page" from within the preview window (this option and two other
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options were provided as the defaults for this widget). This caused
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my preview window to load Visual DHTML in the preview window! The
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page I was working on disappeared! Fortunately, a right mouse click
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in the preview window brought up the familiar Netscape popup menu from
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which I could choose "Back" to return to my DHTML page. Similarly,
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I discovered that I could restart the Visual DHTML application from its
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Main Window by using the Back option of the Netscape popup menu (ie the
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menu you get with a right mouse click in a browser window). Note
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that if you do this and you have a preview window open then the restarted
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VDHTML will not recognize that window - you'll have to start a new preview
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window.
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<P>This little experiment with using the BACK option also showed another
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little bug - the menu bar in the real VDHTML window is statically sized,
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so when VDHTML opened in my larger preview window, the menu bar didn't
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go all the way across the window. Maybe its not a bug. Its
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a design intent. I just don't think they meant for VDHTML to be opened
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in the preview window! After seeing this I tried to resize the Main
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Window using the window manager handles, except I discovered there were
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no handles for resizing that window. An old GUI developers trick
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- if you don't want the user doing something, don't give them the ability
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to do so. I use it all the time when dealing with resizing windows.
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Realignment of widgets in Motif is a pain.
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<P>DHTML can usually be embedded within any of the widgets since most take
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either URLs or ordinary text in their configurable options. The text
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can be DHTML although VDHTML doesn't really make it easy to add this to
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the text field in the options window.
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<P><I>Bug: If the link is down or very slow there doesn't appear
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to be a way to tell VDHTML to stop trying to connect to the remote URL.
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You can't do anything with Netscape until the hosts network address is
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resolved.</I>
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<P>Since no links show up in the status bar like in an ordinary browser
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window you can't tell when you've place the mouse over a link in either
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the preview window or the Main window. This is probably a good thing,
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but in places (like the toolbar widget and item links) it would help.
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<P>Don't forget that this tool is creating a DHTML page, which is an ordinary
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text file. You can save the file to disk and edit it later, so don't
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fret too much about the lack of configurability in the current release
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of the VDHTML application. If you do attempt to save your creation
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you will need to go through one of the Java security dialogs to grant the
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application (Netscape) to access your local hard disk. I never had
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to deal with this particular security aspect in the past and it suprised
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me just a bit. But don't worry - its just the local VDHTML application
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you're granting access to and it is only for the current session, unless
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you specify that the browser remember this priviledge by clicking on a
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toggle in the dialog.
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<P>The code VDHTML produces is marginally readable, but don't expect it
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to fit nicely inside 80 column wide editor windows! Like the code
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produced by the Page Composer, "newline" line breaks are not included in
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the HTML text. You can edit this text as easily as any other text
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once you get used to the missing newlines.
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<BR>
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<P><B>What is my opinion of its current state.</B>
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<P>VDHMTL makes use of Layers and Cascading Style Sheets. These are
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rather interesting new features for HTML, certainly ones which can add
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some life to relatively static pages. But the overhead for animating
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and running scripts within the browser is unclear. My system didn't
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bog down, but it did have half of its available physical memory used up
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by the browser while it ran this tool. For now, this is to be expected.
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Get the application working first, then work on cleaning it up to make
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it efficient. Not the best development plan, but a common one nonetheless.
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I expect that much of the improvements in the future will come not from
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the VDHTML code itself, but in the way the browser handles that code.
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<P>As for Visual DHTML itself, it needs some work. The interface
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is nice but I expect it to change drastically over the next few releases.
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Most of the widgets don't have nearly all the possible configurable parameters
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they could have so the Main Window will probably change to accomodate those
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options. There are lots of bugs and unexpected behaviours in this
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release, like accidently launching the application in the preview window.
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It is, in fact, so buggy that I gave up trying to get a screen shot of
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the available default widgets because I couldn't get them all to cooperate
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enough so I could position them within a reasonably sized window.
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And the use of style sheets is not very evident - no font configuration
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for example.
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<P>But for a first release its not bad. It will give you an idea
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of what DHTML is all about and what is possible with it. The code
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will be heavy with JavaScript so this might give you a chance to learn
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some of the new tricks with the 1.2 release as well. But for now,
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Visual DHTML is just a tool for experimentation. Don't expect to
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be able to create overly ambitious Dynamic HTML projects with it just yet.
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<P>One final note: on the Netscape page for Visual DHTML is a link
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to an Midi-player example from Crescendo that was written with Visual DHTML.
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Watch out for the Crescendo sample page! It removes the Netscape
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menu bars and using the back button doesn't get them back! I had
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to exit Netscape using my window manager Close option and start over.
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Caveat surfer.
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<BR>
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<TABLE WIDTH="100%" >
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<TR>
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<TD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN="4" BGCOLOR="#000000" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><IMG SRC="../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif" ALT="indent" ALIGN=LEFT></TD>
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</TR>
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</TABLE>
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<TABLE WIDTH="100%" >
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<TR>
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<TD ALIGN=RIGHT><FONT SIZE=-2>© 1998 by <A HREF="mailto:mjhammel@csn.net">Michael
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J. Hammel</A></FONT></TD>
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</TR>
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</TABLE>
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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