Last updated 5/11/03

HighWire documentation


Table of contents
  1. HighWire release license
  2. What is HighWire?
  3. HighWire development team
  4. Use of HighWire
  5. Use of FontList
  6. Supported HTML tags
  7. Project links

 

1.  HighWire release license

This software is provided ‘as-is’, without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.

2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.

3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

Anyone uses bits of the code for other reasons is welcome to, as long as they specifically state that their work is based, in part, on the Project HighWire source release by Robert Goldsmith.

 

2.  What is HighWire?

This is taken from the HighWire site written by the original author, Robert Goldsmith.
For those of you who have not heard, HighWire is a new web browser. It has been in ‘development’ for over a year. I started HighWire in what I considered a feeble attempt to discourage me from moaning about CAB. I figured that when I proved my code was vastly slower than CAB at parsing and rendering a page I would give up and accept that browsing on my Falcon would always be slow.
Things did not turn out how I expected...

I think the big problem with my plan was that, unbeknownst to me at the time, I had had a couple of rather good ideas. The result is HighWire.

Ok, so can I download it? You cannot write a web-browser in a month. I know, I tried. :) HighWire is still very much in development.

Originally HighWire could do the following:

Where we have gone with the project ...

New items since it went open source:

It is currently missing:

So why all the fuss?

Well, HighWire can load in, parse and render an HTML page in full 16-bit fonts (for all the ‘strange’ characters such as þ) in about half the time of CAB. Furthermore, once a page is pre-rendered (before the first time it is displayed) it does not need further processing, making redraws and window resizes much much faster. On a Hades machine the code was tested on, the page render including font sizes, centering and lists redrew correctly in real time (with a slight flicker...) as the window was resized.

 

3.  HighWire development team

 

4.  Use of HighWire

System requirements:

Hotkeys:

The scroll elements support the right mouse button

File types supported:

Configuration

 

5.  Use of FontList

FontList

Coded by Lp and GokMasE for the HighWire Project

FontList is a small utility to change the font settings in the HighWire configuration file.

Installation

Keep this binary in the HighWire directory. (Same directory as the highwire.cfg file.)

Usage

As of FontList 1.11 a default config file is created at launch time, unless an existing file is located in FontList's work directory. Also note that if the font setting you are seeking to change is not present (or not activated) in the old config file, FontList will add the new setting to the end of the config.

Select 1 (there can be only one) of the fonts, then use menubar to decide what setting in HighWire should be affected. You can also right click on any of the fonts to open up a popup menu and select a text style to link the current font ID to. Note that changes are written to HighWire configuration file instantly when you select an entry in either menu!

Another thing you can do, is select a number of fonts (hold down CTRL) and later press CTRL + C. Then the prg will save a list of all currently selected fonts to the clipboard.

CTRL + A selects / deselects all.

NOTE: When NVDI is installed, all non-speedo fonts are greyed out and thus not selectable. The reason for this is that HighWire at this time does not support other format than Speedo. However, if you wish to play around with other fonts you can enable all listed fonts by selecting ‘Allow non-speedo’ from menubar.

General Advice

It might be a good idea to keep a backup of latest working configuration file.

 

6.  Supported HTML tags

Here are some of the HTML tags that HighWire supports:
Hopefully will be updated to list all supported tags.

7.  Project links

While HighWire won't directly use these at this point. Here are some useful links for the HighWire project:

http://highwire.atari-users.net - Place for most current downloads and information about the Highwire project.

HighWire Users mailing list - A list for users to ask questions and report bugs.

HighWire Developer Mailing list - A list for people interested in actively working on the project.