NCSA Mosaic Documentation

This document is the entry point for documentation on NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System.

For general information and answers to commonly asked questions, see the FAQ list. Please read the FAQ; a lot of information is in there. If you have unresolved questions or problems, feel free to mail mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Documentation on the following parts of NCSA Mosaic is currently available:

• The Document View window and its components.
• Available X resources.
• Available command-line flags.

Other documentation that may be of interest includes:

• Information on various versions of Mosaic.
• Information on Mosaic's group annotation capabilities.
• Information on operating Mosaic by remote control from other applications.
• Information on browsing HDF and netCDF data files with Mosaic.

Also see what's new for Mosaic.

Special Note on Hangs

The World Wide Web is a very broad and very dynamic information mass spanning six continents and thousands of academic, research, and industrial institutions; any server on the network may be inactive or unreliable at any time. When a server is unavailable, clients such as NCSA Mosaic that attempt to access that server may hang.

Early versions of NCSA Mosaic are not robust when it comes to recovering from such hangs, and typically take thirty seconds to a minute to time out from a bad connection. However, if you are in a hurry there is something you can do -- when a hang occurs, send the application a SIGINT signal (the easiest way to do this is to hit Control-c in your shell window). This may cause the program to crash; if so, it's currently unavoidable.

Later versions of NCSA Mosaic will provide better mechanisms for controlling these situations.