Up and Running with Frontier Web Site Management
by Matt Neuburg
Author of the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide

Prev | TOC | Next


Other Automatic HTML

Automatic links

Frontier does perform a little more automatic HTML for you, which you can prevent if you don't want it. To see an example, go into myFirstSite.default and add at the end this line:

<p>Comments? Write to webmaster@www.mySite.com</p>

Preview this in the browser. Notice that, in the browser, "webmaster@www.mySite.com" is a link! In fact, it's a mailto link, linking to webmaster@www.mySite.com. Frontier interprets as a mailto link any expression not inside quotes that is made up of certain basic alphanumeric characters and contains an "@" sign.

If you don't want an email address interpreted in this way, or if you want to use an "@" in some other way, you simply "escape" the "@" by putting a backslash in front of it.

Try it: change the last line to:

<p>Comments? Write to webmaster\@www.mySite.com</p>

See the backslash? Preview this in the browser; the backslash is gone, but the email address is no longer a link.

Frontier does the same sort of thing with URLs that contain "//", where this time the "//" is the trigger for the change, and can be overridden by putting a backslash before it. Make the last two lines of myFirstSite.default look like this:

<p>Comments? Write to webmaster@www.mySite.com<br>
And don't forget to check out http://www.scripting.com!</p>

Preview this in the browser. Both expressions are turned into links. But if you say:

And don't forget to check out http:\//www.scripting.com!</p>

then when you preview it in the browser, the backslash is gone, and it isn't a link.

Besides preventing one or both of these expression types from being turned into links by the backslash escapement method, you can also turn the whole mechanism off with the #activeURLs directive; set it to false to turn off the mechanism.

Note: Since the backslash is the "escape" character, it is never rendered literally. If you need a literal backslash to appear in the browser, you have to type two backslashes in a row in the Frontier text. Also, it does no harm to put a backslash character before a character that has no special meaning; the backslash will just be removed during rendering, with no further effect.

Character translation

Frontier does one more piece of basic HTML for you. To see it, first go into user.html.prefs and note that "charset" is set to "iso-8859-1" and "isoFilter" is set to true.

Now, in myFirstSite.default, change the phrase "very easy" to "très simple" (to get e with an accent grave, you type option-backquote, then e) [alt-keypad-0232]. Preview in the browser.

It looks fine; that is, you see "très simple" there as well. But as you know if you have some experience with these things, that's not trivial, because in order to get computers from all platforms to see the same thing with their Web browsers over the Internet, special characters have to be specially encoded. Frontier has done this, replacing our "très" with:

tr&egrave;s

So, all you have to do is type text; Frontier will render in such a way as to make the result legible to all platforms (to the extent that this is possible).

Where to edit HTML

Frontier does generate some more HTML, which we'll learn about. But on the whole, you are expect to create HTML yourself. Some ability to insert rudimentary HTML conveniently is provided by way of the HTML menu (for instance, you can select a word in a wptext and then surround it with <b> and </b>); but Frontier does not pretend to be a full-bore HTML editor.

However, you can do your HTML editing in some other application and paste it into Frontier.

If you think about it for a moment, this is a very sensible way for Frontier to work. Frontier applies itself to what it is peculiarly good at; it is pointless for it to reinvent wheels that are well implemented elsewhere.

On Mac OS, there are two programs have a special relationship with Frontier: they can edit a Frontier wptext directly, without your having to cut and paste between the two programs. These are BBEdit and PageSpinner.

Instead of double-clicking a wptext to open and edit it, select it and choose Edit With App from Frontier's Main menu. This will send the text to BBEdit so you can edit it there, and then when you Save from BBEdit the changed text is automatically sent back into the Frontier database. BBEdit is what's called an "external editor" for a wptext.

To change your choice of external editor to be PageSpinner, delete user.odbeditors.texteditor, and change suites.odbEditor.editors.Text.apps so that instead of {'R*ch'} it says {'JyWs'}.


Prev | TOC | Next

All text is by Matt Neuburg, phd, matt@tidbits.com.
For information about the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide, see my home page:
http://www.tidbits.com/matt
All text copyright Matt Neuburg, 1997 and 1998. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No one else has any right to copy or reproduce in any form, including electronic. You may download this material but you may not post it for others to see or distribute it to others without explicit permission from the author.
Downloadable versions at http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.hqx and http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.zip.
Please do not confuse this tutorial with a certain other Frontier 5 tutorial based upon my earlier work.
This page created with Frontier, 2/11/2000; 7:00:00 PM.