Overview

Congratulations on successfully running Hv3 - the minimalist browser designed to test Tkhtml3. Please configure your web proxy:

Although it is not as polished as a "real" browser, Hv3 supports file:// and http:// URIs, HTTP cookies, HTML forms and contains a primitive back/forward history list. If convenient, please help by using Hv3 for some of your web-browsing and report bugs using the interface at:

http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/cvstrac/

It goes without saying that under no circumstances should you use Hv3 to e-mail the boss, transfer funds to Nigeria, order pizza, or anything else important. Read on for further details.

Web Proxy Configuration Details

Hv3 includes simple support for the http protocol, using the built-in Tcl http package. However hv3 implements no caching of any kind, not even DNS caching. This means that in some environments using hv3 to view http URIs can seem much slower than one would expect. Also, all DNS queries are performed synchronously, so the GUI is sometimes unresponsive. The best fix for these problems is to configure hv3 to use a nearby web proxy (ideally running on the local host) using controls below:

An excellent caching web proxy for this purpose is polipo - http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/. On Linux, it's as simple as:

$ wget http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/files/polipo/polipo-0.9.9.tar.gz
...
$ tar -xzf polipo-0.9.9.tar.gz
$ cd polipo-0.9.9
$ ./configure
...
$ make
...
$ ./polipo

And you have a caching web proxy listening for loopback connections on Tcp port 8123.

Hv3 Usage

Hv3 provides more or less the same user interface as other hypertext applications. The "history" pull-down menu and the "back", "stop" and "forward" buttons should be familiar to all.

• The "font size table" menu is used to manipulate the table of font sizes used to map from CSS2 absolute font sizes to values expressed in points (for example, setting the CSS2 font-size property to "x-small" might map to a font size of 8 points. Refer to the appropriate section of CSS2 for details.
• Right clicking on the document launches the tree browser, a GUI for examining the structure of the current document. The tree browser can also be launched via the "browser" command on the "file" pull-down menu.
• Middle clicking on the document causes Hv3 to interpret the current selection (from any application, not just Hv3) as a document URI to load.
• Pressing the "Q" key while the document window has the focus exits the application.

Credits

• Hv3 uses the pure-tcl combobox widget created by Bryan Oakley http://www.purl.org/net/oakley/tcl/combobox/index.html.
• If available, the File-Tkcon menu entry launches the tkcon console by Jeffrey Hobbs and others. http://tkcon.sourceforge.net