lternatively, choose Edit Place from the Places menu.

The first part of a URL (the part before the ":") is the Internet transfer protocol of the page you are trying to access. This indicates the type of the page and how the browser accesses the page. See the next section ("Supported Protocols") to find out about the different types of URLs that you can use in HotJava.

Supported Protocols

You can use the HotJava Browser to visit Web pages, display documents, send email, and browse GOPHER and FTP sites. In other words, the HotJava Browser supports these major Internet transfer protocols:

http:

This stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, the standard protocol used to access Web pages on the Internet.

To visit a Web page, type:

http://Internet-host/path-to-document

in the Place field and press Return or Enter.

You can omit the http:// portion of the URL if you want; the HotJava Browser will automatically add this for you. For example, these two URL's both take you to the HotJava Browser section of the JavaSoft home page:

http://www.javasoft.com/products/HotJava
www.javasoft.com/products/HotJava

Furthermore, if the URL is a simple name containing only letters, numbers, and hyphens (that is, a name that does not contain any periods, slashes, colons, and so on), HotJava adds www. to the start of the name, and .com to the end of the name. It then adds the http:// to the front of the URL.

For example, if you type sun in the Place field, this gets expanded first to www.sun.com, then to http://www.sun.com, which saves you a lot of typing.

https:

This protocol works just like the http protocol, except that it is used to retrieve documents from a secure server. This means that documents passed between your computer and the secure site are encrypted so that they cannot be read by any other sites, and that no other computer can deceive the HotJava Browser to think that they are the secure site.

NOTE: This protocol does not work in the exported versions of the HotJava Browser. Due to export laws, it is currently only supported for the US Domestic release.

A key appears to the right of the Place field when you're connected to a secure (https) site:

file:

Use this protocol to display a local file. You need to specify the full path name of the file. You can omit the file: portion of the URL if you'd like. For example, both of these URL's display the same file:

file:/mydirectory/myfile.txt
/mydirectory/myfile.txt

If you're loading an ASCII text file, the file must have one of the following extensions:

.text .txt .java .c .cc .c++ .h .pl .el

Note to Windows users:: To access a file on your C (or other) drive, start your URL with the string file:/c:/yourfile or /c:/yourfile.
If you want to list the contents of the C drive, use the URL file:/c:/. or /c:/..
If you type a URL that starts with "c:", you'll get an error message instead of a file listing from drive C. As described above, when a URL starts with a simple text string before a colon, the string is considered to be an Internet Transfer Protocol. Since HotJava supports locally extensible protocol handlers, you could potentially have a protocol on your system called "c". Therefore, the HotJava Browser must interpret a URL that starts with "c:" as if "c" is a protocol instead of a drive.

ftp:

You can use the HotJava Browser to browse FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. FTP sites are archives of files that you can download across the Internet. If the name of your FTP site starts with "ftp.", you can omit the ftp:// part of the URL; HotJava will automatically add it for you.

When you specify an FTP URL, HotJava displays the directories and files at the FTP site. Click on a directory to go there, or click on a file you want to see. If HotJava recognizes the file type, it displays the file. If HotJava doesn't recognize the file type, it displays a page you can use to save the file locally.

gopher:

Gopher servers are similar to FTP servers, in that they are archives of files. To visit a Gopher site, type in the full URL, or, if the server starts with "gopher.", you can omit the gopher:// portion of the URL.

mailto:

To send email from HotJava, type:

mailto: recipient's-email-address

in the Place field and press Return or Enter. This displays the mail form, in which you can compose your email message and send it. Alternatively, you can choose Send Mail from the File menu to access the mail form.

If you'd like to have the mail form displayed in a separate HotJava Browser window, hold down the Shift key while you press Return or Enter after typing the URL in the Place field. Or, hold down the Shift key while you choose Send Mail.

doc:

You may notice that sometimes the URL for a page displayed by the HotJava Browser starts with doc://. This is a protocol that HotJava uses to locate local HotJava files within the HotJava Browser installation, or, if the file is not found locally, at an alternate location specified by the doc.url property. (See Customizing the HotJava Browser for information about the HotJava properties.) The default value of the doc.url property is the HotJava Browser Web page.

This protocol is not recognized by other browsers.

Helpful Hints and Shortcuts

To bring up any page in a separate HotJava window, hold down the Shift key while:
- clicking on a link
- choosing a menu item that opens a page
- pressing Return or Enter after typing a URL into the Place field
- double-clicking on a bookmark in the Remembered Places window
Holding down the Shift key tells HotJava to clone itself for the new page.
You can also choose Clone Window from the File menu to create a new HotJava window displaying the current page.
Another way to clone a window is to press the right mouse button over a link or image, then choose Open this Link in New Window or Open this Image in New Window from the pop-up menu that appears.
NOTE: The new HotJava window is part of the current HotJava session, so it does not consume as many system resources as starting a new instance of the HotJava application would. If you clone one or more windows and then change preferences in one window, the changes apply to all the cloned windows since they are all part of the same HotJava session.
To stop fetching a URL, click on the Stop button , choose Stop Loading from the View menu, or start loading another page. This stops the loading of all HTML pages and applets. It does not stop applets that are already loaded from running; it only stops the loading process. If HotJava is making a connection when you click on the Stop button or choose a new page, the connection attempt is completed before loading stops.
To monitor the progre