Browser Settings

Various parameters of the hypertext rendering engine whose output is usually displayed by a viewer window can be determined within this dialog. Any changes made and accepted here influence all subsequent renderings immediately. Some values determine the appearance of certain elements and therefore have an effect on layout and accessibility of a page, as described below.

The following parameters can be specified:

Margin (text)
Width (text)

The left margin and the width of the outputted text may be specified here. The default is to have no left margin and to use the full width of the output window. The actual width of the window, reduced by the margin, is implicitly added to the specified width if its value is less than or equal to zero.

IndLeft (text)
IndRight (text)

These two values set the indentation of list items and similar elements such as <li>, <dd> and <blockquote>. The minimum value for the left side is forced to 3 while 0 is sufficient for the right side. <dd> elements that are part of a compact definition list are indented by two additional spaces to leave more room for suitable <dt> elements to be positioned in front of the first line.

Align (list: left, right, center, justify)

Defines the default text alignment of text blocks when not otherwise specified for a hypertext block element. Unfortunately, it does not apply to the contents of tables, because the default alignment is defined to be left there.

Attr (list: yes, no)

Specifies whether the align attribute of hypertext block elements should be honored or not. If disabled, the value of the Align parameter is always in effect and does also apply to the contents of tables. The only exception is that the alignment of <h1> headings is always respected.

Images (list: none, alt, link, all, xall)

Determines the way inline images should be handled:

none
all images are ignored entirely,
alt
only images with attached alt attribute are displayed,
link
images with attached alt attribute and images that are part of a link are displayed,
all
all images are displayed,
xall
all images including images with empty alt attribute are displayed.

Note that displaying an image means that it is replaced by an appropriate text representation as w3browse is not able to really display inline images. Images with an empty alt attribute value are not displayed except for "xall".

Nbsp (list: none, text, all)

Defines the manner in which non-breaking spaces should be treated:

none
all non-breaking spaces are replaced by normal spaces,
text
text blocks that consist only of white-space, non-breaking spaces and line breaks are ignored, and additionally, lines within text blocks that consist only of such characters count as empty lines,
all
all non-breaking spaces are preserved and handled like any other printable character.

Note that some authors of web pages make excessive use of non-breaking spaces for layout purposes, so that this parameter may be useful in order to get a reasonable representation of such pages.

UlnHdr (list: none, h1, h1-h2, h1-h3, h1-h4, h1-h5, h1-h6)

Determines whether and up to which level heading titles should be underlined. <h1> headings are underlined with the character "*", <h2> headings with "=", and "-" is used for all other levels.

Rules (list: yes, null, no)

Determines whether and how horizontal rules (<hr> elements) should be displayed. An empty line is enforced in their place between adjoining elements if option "null" is being selected.

VSpace (list: packed, compact, normal, loose)

This parameter specifies the vertical spacing mode that should be used for the visual separation of text blocks. The following options are available:

packed
This is the most compact mode. Almost all empty lines between text blocks are avoided except for headings and preformatted text.
compact
Like "normal" except that compact definition lists are recognized as such and dealt with accordingly. This is also true for "packed". Additionally, an empty line between adjacent rows of a table that is not in a list-like context is not enforced.
normal
This is the standard vertical spacing mode. Most adjacent block elements are separated by an empty line with certain well-known exceptions for lists and non-paragraph elements in list-like contexts. Compact definition lists are not treated specially.
loose
All block elements except adjacent definition terms are separated by an empty line. The difference between this mode and "normal" is that all blocks of text that are not already enclosed in paragraphs are caused to pretend that they are. This may increase the readability of pages, but it may also make the text longer (more scrolling necessary).

More details about the underlying formatting rules can be found below.

Tbl (list: div, line, list)

Determines how the rows of a table should be treated. The following table modes are available:

div
the whole table and each row are encapsulated within div sections,
line
each row is started on a new line without extra indentation,
list
each row makes up an item of an unordered list and is displayed accordingly.

Using the "list" mode may be helpful in order to get more information about the structure of the tables that are contained in a page.

WMLMode (list: card, deck)

This parameter specifies the manner in which WML documents should be displayed. The following display modes are available:

card
only one WML card is displayed at a time,
deck
all cards of a WML deck are shown at once.

When operating in "deck" mode, the contents of each card is preceded by its title if available and is terminated by a horizontal rule if enabled.

Formatting Rules

Some of the rules that are used by the hypertext rendering engine in order to produce the formatted output of hypertext documents can be described as follows: