MMM : navigation

Hypertext links and active objects

In an HTML document, hypertext links (or anchors) are usually displayed in blue and underlined. The author of the document may have specified a different color, but in any case: There are also active objects, like images; some are simple buttons, and you can see the same feedback as for anchors in text. Others contain different actives zones : the mouse cursor is then an arrow oriented to the top and left. Either the image is not yet loaded, and then clicking with button 1 will pop up a menu with the different possible links, or the image is loaded, and it suffices to click at the appropriate zone.

There are several ways to activate an anchor, summarized below:

Button-1
displays the document pointed to by this link in the same window, except when specified otherwise by the document author (frames)
Shift + Button 1
save the document pointed to by this link (after asking a file name in a dialog box)
Button 3
displays the document pointed to by this link in a new window
Control + Button 1
pops up a link activation menu, containing the above functionalities and possible more
The particular choice of mouse buttons and additionnal modifier keys is configurable by the user, by editing the preference file and writing the adequate resources

Tool bar

The tool bar offers the following navigation buttons:
Home
goes to the Home document, as defined here
Back
goes to the previous document (does not work with frames)
Forward
goes the next document (does not work with frames)
These actions are also available from the Navigation menu, and so is direct access to history navigation. Menu shortchuts are configurable by resource definitions in the preference file.

Other interface elements

Reload, Update

Reload causes a complete reload of the document from its original server, in particular asking the proxy not to consult its cache.

Update asks the server if the document has been modified since it has been displayed in MMM (in particular, if MMM initially got this document from the proxy's cache, this action checks with the server if the document is up to date). Some servers do not know how to answer this kind of requests (albeit defined in the HTTP/1.0 standard), and will always return a new copy of the document, even if identical.

HTML Documents

Headers

The displayed title of the document is also a menu in which you can see the HTTP headers of the document. Some headers are also active (e.g. Refresh).

Smooth scroll

The icon with two small arrows (as in scrollbars) changes the scroll mode for this document. In the presence of large tables or images (e.g. whose size is larger that MMM's window size), scrolling doesn't work properly and one must switch to smooth scroll to see the entire contents of the document. This mode can be activated by default in the preferences, but is very costly.

Links

Right of this icon, the Links button, if active, pops up a menu displaying additionnal links possibly specified in the document. If frames were not activated, this menu contains in particular an entry for each frame of the document.

Searching

Typing Control-S in the HTML display window pops up a dialog box for searching text in the displayed document (search will not look into table cells nor frames).

Progress report bar

At the bottom left part of the window, MMM displays a bar reporting on the progress of retrieval of the required document. This bar becomes red if an error was detected during analysis and display of the document (meaning then that the document may not be properly displayed)

Source display

The View Source menu opens a window on the HTML source of the document. This source may be annotated in colors (see how). The locations of the errors are also displayed (underlined), and the corresponding error message is displayed when the mouse cursor goes over the error location. You can edit the source and redisplay the modified version; also, if the document was accessed through a file: URL, you can save the modified document at its location.