SDSC WebView Known Bugs

Description

This page describes some of the known bugs and missing features of the V1.0 Beta 1 release of SDSC WebView. The release contains more than 20,000 lines of code (not including the CERN library). We believe that the code is substantially correct, but (sigh) there are still quite a few known problems.

If you find additional bugs not listed here, or (better yet) find fixes for any bugs, please let us know!

Known Bugs and Missing Features

Windows

Edit Menu

• The Edit menu on the viewing windows isn't implemented, yet.

• The Edit menu of the edit window doesn't recognize when there is nothing currently selected. As a result the Cut, Copy, Duplicate, etc., menu items are improperly enabled.

View Menu

• The headlight sometimes gets off your head! This seems to be very rare, and only when zooming forward and back amongst worlds on the history list. We suspect an OpenInventor bug, since a similar effect occurs in SGIs WebSpace.

• The Allow Spin Animation and Show World Axes menu items only apply to the Examiner Viewer, but stay enabled regardless of what viewer is selected.

• The current viewer type indicator doesn't change (from indicating Walk to indicating Fly, for example) based on the viewer requested by a loaded VRML file.

Go Menu

• The Home World item isn't implemented, yet.

• The Stop Loading item isn't implemented, yet.

• The View History item isn't implemented, yet.

Viewpoints Menu

• The Link ViewPoints item isn't implemented, yet.

Options Menu

• The Preferences... item isn't implemented, yet.

• The Show Menubar option is currently disabled, and the menubar is always turned on. The underlying code is implemented to turn this off. Unfortunately, once off, you can't turn it back on again! The problem is that Motif stops applying menu item accelerators once the menu bar is turned off. Without those accelerators, you can't turn it back on. So, we need to implement accelerators differently.

• The Full Screen option isn't implemented, yet.

Anchors

• As you move the cursor over an anchor, the URL appears in the status area at the bottom of the screen. It currently flickers a lot due to a bug in the event handling.

• When bad anchors are encountered, the underlying CERN library calls a function to report the error. That function is currently stubbed out and is silent. In the future this will put up a helpful dialog box.

• Occasionally you have to click twice on the "back arrow" tool in order to go back to a previous scene.

Preferences

• User's may create a preferences file, typically in their home directory under the name .webview-preferences. That file is read in at startup. Since the preferences dialog is not implemented, yet, there is no graphical way of changing preferences. The file, however, is ASCII text and the preferences are largely self-explanitory. A preferences dialog and appropriate documentation will follow in the next release.

Editing

• The interface is still a bit quirky for editing. You must have Edit mode on in a viewing window (select the pencil icon) in order for selections in the scene graph editor to be highlighted in the viewing window. This will be changed in a future release.

• The left and middle mouse buttons in the scene graph editor are supposed to move the viewpoint about. Instead, the left mouse button selects items, while the middle mouse button does nothing. The right mouse button, however, does what it's supposed to. ( NOTE: This bug has been fixed in v1.0b1.1. Please check the version number printed in the bottom left corner of the WebView window. If it says "v1.0 Beta 1.1" you have this fix already. If not, you can download the latest source from SDSC! )

VRML Features

• Textures must be local files in the current directory. We'll handle these as full URLs in the next release.

• Textures must be SGI RGB images. We'll support several dozen image file formats in the next release by using the SDSC Image Tools.

• The width field of AsciiText isn't implemented, yet.

• isA is not supported, yet.

• POINT map type for WWWAnchors doesn't work properly, yet.

URLs

• We currently use the CERN library of common code. We intend to reimplement all of the relevant URL parsing and protocol handling of that package for a future release, thereby allowing us to discontinue using CERN. Until then, we appologize for any inconvenience.

• The CERN library does not look at a user's .mime.types file, but rather hardcodes MIME types into the library.

Source Code

• Quite a bit of the source code is just plain ugly. This is an artifact of the process we're using to add a scene graph editor to the viewer. That editor is based on SGI's 'gview' sample application. That application has its own way of doing things that contrast to WebView's way of doing things. It will take a bit more cleaning and rearranging to make this neater.

• The source code employs some questionable C++ style. This will be cleaned up in the future.