Use the Preferences panel to customize OmniWeb's default settings. The choices you make here are retained from session to session, so you don't need to reconfigure these settings every time you run the program.Choose Preferences from the Info menu to raise the Preferences panel. Choose any subset of settings by clicking the appropriate button at the top of the panel.
If you wish to revert to the default settings, you may click on the Defaults button located in the lower left-hand corner of each preferences subwindow.
If you set it to an empty string, a blank page appears. (This makes opening new browsers faster, but is less user-friendly.)
[Note: The term "home page" is also used to refer to the top-level page on a web site.]
Use these preferences to set the color for your browser (text) background, Bookmarks background, plain text, and the three different types of links.
To change a color, click the rim of any of the color wells. This raises the NEXTSTEP Colors panel. From here you can select a color from any of several different selection formats, including the Pantone color grid and a standard RGB color wheel. Click on the color you want in the grid, or drag colors from one well to another. You can also raise the NEXTSTEP Colors panel using the Colors button and drag colors from the grids into the selected color wells.
The new colors will be visible when you display a new page, reload the current page, or quit and restart OmniWeb.
If you select Always use preference colors, your browser will ignore nonstandard text and background colors on the pages you visit, displaying the colors you have selected instead.
There are three font types that are used in the display of web pages. Fonts control the size and shape of text on a page, just as typefaces do in newspapers.
These preferences control several of OmniWeb's display characteristics.
Using the following alternatives, you can display web pages the way the common browser Netscape would, rather than adhering to strict SGML and HTML standards. Many web authors mistakenly believe that Netscape display standards are universal, and as a result their pages look "wrong" when viewed with other browsers. OmniWeb gives you the option of ignoring some of their common errors.
Spoofing is a means of tricking the server into thinking that you are using Netscape, which supports most HTML 3.0 extensions. If you encounter a page that you know looks different in Netscape, use the Add button to add the site name to your Domains to Spoof list.. Remove deletes the highlighted domain name from the spoof list.
A cookie is a tag that a web server assigns you to keep track of who you are as you browse around a site. Servers that support cookies will invisibly allocate you a cookie when you first enter their site, and OmniWeb will send the cookie back to the server with every new document request. The server can then tailor the document it returns to you.
Cookies are useful for sites that want to remember things about their users; for example, if you go to a shopping site, you can browse around and buy things, and the server will know from page to page who you are and what you have already bought. (This same thing is often accomplished using invisible fields in HTML files, which is a more primitive and kludgey method.)
OmniWeb keeps cookies around in-between sessions, meaning if you quit OmniWeb and restart, then go back to a site that has tagged you with a cookie, the site will remember you. Cookie preferences allow you to erase cookies for sites you don't care about or don't want to remember you. Select the server you wish to remove and click the Delete button.
More information on cookies is available.
Warning! Proxy preferences should only be changed by users or administrators who understand proxies. If you change this preference haphazardly, OmniWeb may not work. Typically, system administrators should set up proxies once for an entire site using our site-wide defaults mechanism.
A proxy is an HTTP server typically running on a firewall machine, providing people inside the firewall with access to the outside world. Use the Proxy preferences to add or remove proxies, gateways, or local servers.
The Proxy Server URL table gives a list of proxy servers your machine has access to. This list is order-dependent: earlier items on the list are checked first when OmniWeb is looking to connect to a host. When you click on an item in this list, it changes the two lists below it to reflect which Protocols and Destinations should be sent to the selected Proxy Server URL.
If your machine is behind a firewall, click the Add button under the Proxy Server URL table on the Proxy preferences panel. You'll then get two servers inserted for you automatically, "(non-proxied protocols and destinations)", and "http://your-proxy-server.domain.suffix/".
The special entry "(non-proxied protocols and destinations)" is for listing protocols, machines, and networks you can access directly without having to go through your firewall. Typically this only includes machines that are in your local domain (at your site), so your domain is inserted automatically into this list. If your site has a special connection to another site you trust, and if both firewalls are configured correctly you can add the other site under Destinations for non-proxied protocols and destinations. You may also add destinations if your site has multiple domains.
You'll need to rename the default Proxy Server URL "http://your-proxy-server.domain.suffix/" to get proxies working at all. Double-click on this entry and type in the real host name of your proxy server in between the slashes. Typically, sites will have only one proxy server to the outside world, but some may have more, which you can add by clicking on the "Add" button again. Ask your system administrator for the name of your proxy server machine(s), and which protocols they serve.
If you have only one proxy server at your site and it serves all protocols, as it usually will, you're done; proxies should work correctly. Stop reading now and test them out.
If your proxy server only serves some protocols, you can enter them into the Protocols table. Make sure you've selected the correct server in the Proxy Server URL table first. If your proxy server only serves certain hosts or domains, enter them in the Destinations table. Only enter host names or domain names in this table &emdash; don't try to enter paths.
Remember, the ordering of the top table is important; OmniWeb scans down the list of proxy servers until it finds a server that can handle the protocol and destination of the URL it is trying to fetch. If a proxy server doesn't list any specific protocols, that means it accepts all protocols, and if it doesn't list any destinations, that means it accepts any destination. Thus, the default set-up after you first click the "Add" button under the Proxy Server URL is for all protocols (empty Protocol table) in your local domain (the default entry in Destinations is your domain) to be non-proxied (the special first URL), and for every other host and protocol to be routed through "http://your-proxy-server.domain.suffix/" (the second entry in the Proxy Server URL table has no protocols or destinations listed, meaning it accepts anything).
If you enter a blank URL if the Proxy Server URL table, that stands for "(non-proxied protocols and destinations)". You will only do this if you have a truly bizarre setup, but it's there if you need it.
More information on proxies is available.
Warning! Cache preferences should only be changed by users or administrators who understand caching. If you change this preference haphazardly, OmniWeb may not work.
To cache an item is to store it in your machine's virtual memory. A page or image that has been cached will not need to be reloaded from its remote site for you to view it a second time.
You normally should only change three of the cache entries: the Omni/Source, Omni/Image, and Omni/DocView types. You can set the expiration time for these cache types, either by specifying the number of seconds, or by using the NeverExpire or ExpireWhenFlushed settings. The former means data of that type will not expire until you quit OmniWeb, while the latter causes items to be emptied from cache only when you execute the Flush Cache command but not otherwise.
The Omni/Source type specifices how long document source will be locally stored &emdash; for example, ascii HTML files or compressed GIF and JPEG images. The default is five minutes, which means if you access a document again within five minutes you won't have to fetch it over the network, but your machine will have to decompress the source again, which takes time on slow machines. Increase this type if you have a fast machine, but little memory and a slow network.
The Omni/Image type tells OmniWeb how long to locally store images (i.e. JPEGs and GIFs) once they are decompressed into a format NEXTSTEP can understand. The default is 10 minutes. If other documents access these images again within 10 minutes, they won't have to be re-decompressed from the source (or loaded off the network), so they'll show up faster than if only the source were cached. However, keeping uncompressed images around uses up more memory than keeping the source (until they expire, of course). Set this higher if you have lots of memory, a slow network and a slow machine.
The Omni/DocView is a catch-all type for documents displayed in the browser. Typically, these are processed HTML files, but will sometimes be FTP listings or, eventually, PDF files. The default for this type is 10 minutes. If you re-access a document whose DocView is cached, the document won't have to be re-processed by OmniWeb, which will mean you won't have to wait either for the network or for the unpacking. Additionally, if you are filling out an HTML form, the form will retain your data between visits until the DocView times out.
You may guess that if you set Omni/DocView and Omni/Image higher than Omni/Source (as they are by default), OmniWeb will always use the former two, and there's no point in keeping the latter. In practice, this is not quite true. There are two instances when OmniWeb must go back to the source: one is if you do a View Source command (command-shift-V), the other is if you save a document (command-shift-S or command-drag) or an image (drag out to workspace). Keeping the source around for some time insures these operations don't have to re-download the document.
Please send comments, corrections, and suggestions regarding this documentation to OmniWeb-docs@omnigroup.com. Omni always welcomes your feedback!