Mosaic TueV 2.4.3: Multilingual GUI and Improvements towards User Friendliness

Mike Bretz, Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung, Universität Tübingen, Brunnenstr. 27, D-72074 Tübingen
mike.bretz@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de
Uwe Koch, Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung, Universität Tübingen, Brunnenstr. 27, D-72074 Tübingen
uwe.koch@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de
Paul de Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology, Postbus 513, NL-5600 MB Eindhoven
debra@win.tue.nl
Keywords:
browser, Mosaic, multi-lingual GUI, search, kiosk

Multilingual Graphical User Interface

The University of Tübingen is an academic institution with large faculties in theology, the humanities, law and economics, as well as medicine and natural sciences. Since the local information system covers the activities of the whole university, a browser with a graphical user interface with menus in the native language (German, French,...) was needed.

Unfortunately NCSA hardcoded all output related strings in the program text. We rewrote the output routines to use the contents of X-resources in order to provide an interface for the user to change the language of the GUI. This works for all languages which use 8-bit fonts. Support for 16-bit fonts is limited. See poster page 1 and page 2 and high resolution screendump for details.

Searching for Documents within Mosaic: Fish Search

The fish-search is a search mechanism that works by automatically navigating through the Web, searching for documents containing a given set of keywords or a regular expression.

The search works mostly like a robot: it retrieves a document, ranks it according to some criterion (like number of occurrences of keywords), and extracts the links from that document to other documents. These links are put in a list, from which the next document to retrieve is selected. The fish-search uses heuristics to avoid spending too much time searching in directions that do not contain relevant information, and to avoid overloading a single server on the Web.

The search can start either from the "current" document or from the documents in the user's hotlist. The latter option is especially useful for finding information that is not immediately obvious from the title of a document, but which the user knows is present in one of the many documents in the hotlist.

See page 3 of poster, configuration and result screendumps for details.

Information Terminal - Kiosk Mode

The concept for the Information System at the University of Tübingen includes access to information terminals in public areas, now also known as kiosks.

Our design goal was to limit the user as little as possible. Only saving to local files, anonymous mail and, of course, any direct or indirect access to a shell is switched off.

The information terminals are set up on PC's using the Linux operating system. The terminals have been up for months without any technical or security problems. The secure environment was provided by Christian Hüttermann <Huettermann@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de>.

See page 4 of poster and screendumps with unrestricted and restricted file menu and warning dialog for details.

Miscellaneous Technical Improvements

See page 5 of poster for details.

Correct Displaying of Colors

The functions for allocating and freeing of colors has been overworked due to colors being incorrectly displayed when using a large number of colors. Therefore we implemented support for a private colormap to enable Mosaic to use 256 colors for itself.

Compliance with http Specs: Referer

When accessing an http server different from the server of the current document, Mosaic will send the URI with the HTTP Referer header field. This provides server administrators with the URIs of documents with links pointing to the local server. Wrong links are detected and correcting information can be sent to the provider of the document containing the wrong link.

Support of no_proxy

Ari Luotonen <luotonen@dxcern.cern.ch> has provided a patch for preventing proxy use for a given domain by setting the environment variable no_proxy. Additionally pressing the "Reload" button causes Mosaic to send the no-cache pragma to the proxy server, to refresh the server's cache for this page.

Imake Support

Based on early work of R. Klute <klute@tommy.nads.de> we have added support for imake to the Mosaic sources. This makes compilation, configuration and maintenance of Mosaic for different architectures much more comfortable.

Miscellaneous Improvements regarding User-friendliness

See page 6 of poster and high resolution screen dumps of mailto, finger and ftp for details.

We would like to see these improvements incorporated in NCSA's next release of Mosaic. Therefore we have offered NCSA our cooperation since one comprehensive version of Mosaic serves the net community best.

References

[AND93]
Marc Andreessen: NCSA Mosaic Technical Summary, ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Papers/mosaic.ps.Z
[TBL94]
Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web Initiative: The Project, http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
[DBP93]
Paul De Bra, Reinier Post: Searching for Arbitrary Information in the WWW: the Fish-Search for Mosaic, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Searching/debra/article.html
[KOC94]
Uwe Koch: Das Informationssystem der Universität Tübingen, Benutzerinformationen des ZDV der Universität Tübingen, 94/1+2, http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/bi/bi94/bi941ainfo.ps
[KOS94]
Martijn Koster: World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers and Spiders, http://www.nexor.co.uk/users/mak/doc/robots/robots.html