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Advanced Features
Arachnophilia is © Copyright 2006, P. Lutus.
Arachnophilia is CareWare

This page describes features of interest to power Arachnophilia users — how to exercise greater control over the FTP service, how to list and use Arachnophilia system commands, and some other things.
Previewing Web pages that require server-side resources
  • Overview

    PHP and ASP pages are special Web pages that are processed by a server before being presented to the client browser. If you have a server on your development machine, you can use Arachnophilia to preview these pages interactively.

  • Procedure

    During preview, Arachnophilia handles the file types PHP and ASP in a special way. They are assigned a special invocation string that causes them to be handled by your local Web server. This string is user-defined in the browser configuration dialog (HTML ... Configure Browsers).

    You may want to place these special pages in your default HTML directory, in which case you need only type the name of your server into the initialization string, like this:

    http://your-server-name/$1

    Remember that a simple filename is appended to this initialization string (not a path), in the position taken by the "$1" token. This means if you are working in a subdirectory of your Web site's directory tree, you will need to provide this extra path information explicitly, or you can set up an alias in your server software and enter the alias instead. Unlike when previewing ordinary HTML web pages using file paths, you need to sort out the relationship between literal file paths and site relative paths — Arachnophilia cannot do this for you.

    An example. If you are working in a directory named "php" that is a subdirecory of your server's "document root" directory, you would enter:

    http://server-name/php/$1

    One more thing. If you are writing a server-processed page that calls itself recursively, there is no getting around the fact that you will need to save the page and press "refresh" on your browser directly. In a case like this, using a temporary file (Arachnophilia's default previewing approach) won't work.

  • A simple PHP test

    Once you have set up your local Web server, create a new PHP page and place the following line into it, between the <body> and </body> tags:

    <?php phpinfo() ?>

    Set up the server initialization string as explained above and press the preview button. If you have set up your server correctly, you will see a rather long summary of the currently enabled PHP features.

Arachnophilia Macro Architecture
  • Overview

    The macro list at the left in the main Arachnophilia display is actually a sort of telephone switchboard that links menu items, toolbar buttons and keystrokes to Arachnophilia commands (as well as user-entered text). The Arachnophilia command list is rather long, and not all the commands are represented by a menu item or toolbar button in the default configuration.

    To see a list of all the commands, use Tools ... List System Commands. This is a very important list — remember where it is located and refer to it often. Some of the less-often-used commands are only described in the list itself, nowhere else. And any of them can be included in the macros you write.

  • Command Arguments

    Some Arachnophilia commands accept arguments, which allows the user to create specific, powerful commands. An example might be:

    [FindReplaceAll:/cat/dog/]


    This type of macro makes it unnecessary to manually enter search and replace text for common operations.

    In summary, there are many powerful commands in the list, some not listed or described anywhere else. It is a good idea to review this list before asking for a feature that already exists .

Advanced FTP Operations
  • File type determination

    Some platforms must distinguish between text and binary files, in order to process text file line endings. FTP services ordinarily maintain a list of file suffixes and their respective types. Arachnophilia maintains this list as part of its file type configuration file.

    The file type configuration file is located at:

    (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia/FileData.txt


    This file is self-documenting and contains a record for each file type. Each record distinguishes between binary and text file types.

    To add a text file suffix, let's say "xyz", simply add it to an existing text file type, like this (change in red ):

    Text|t|-|txt,text,doc,bat,log,tbd ,xyz ; text files


    Or, you might want to add a new file type simply to contain text file type suffixes, like this:

    TextFileSuffixes|t||abc,def,ghi,jkl ; text file types for FTP


    The FTP service defaults to binary file type (after build 1860) but, to make its final determination, it searches this configuration file for any entries that identify a file type as text.

  • Debugging FTP operations

    The FTP service has a debugging facility, controlled by the slider control at the bottom of the FTP dialog. To see more debugging messages, simply slide the control to the right and run the transaction. Each increment to the right increases the level of detail.

    I receive many "bug reports" from users that simply say "The FTP transaction just stopped." Users need to look at the debugging messages to find out what actually happened.

  • Destination path

    Systems differ widely as to the sort of destination path entry they require. Some systems require that the path begin with a forward slash ("/"), some must not have this, others do not care. This is a very common debugging problem.

    Example — let's say you have a Web site with a target directory of "WebPages". Depending on the operating system the server is running, you may need to make any of these entries for a destination path:

    /home/username/WebPages
    /WebPages
    ~/WebPages
    /


    The easiest way to sort this out is to ask your service which option is correct, but reading the full debugging trace always helps. The destination side may complain if the entry is not correct (but don't enter a directory name without a preceding "/" or "~", this is never correct).

    If you do not use the above-described debugging facility, you may never know why the transfer failed .

HTML Beautifier
The HTML Beautifier (located in the HTML menu) will indent your HTML page just as code beautifiers do, except if the page contains legacy HTML, there can be problems one does not see in code beautifiers. Most of the problems are caused by inconsistent HTML syntax — some tags have closing partners, some do not. And some tags have closing partners sometimes, but not other times, both valid syntax. Example:
My paragraph<p> (legal)

<p align=left>My paragraph</p> (also legal)

Because both these forms are valid HTML, and because there are many such valid examples, there is no meaningful way to write a reliable, robust beautifier for legacy HTML, something I discovered over years of trying. But these problems are solved by converting to XHTML, the main intent of the most recent Arachnophilia versions.

The previous major version of Arachnophilia (4.0) had a much more ambitious beautifier that also tried to correct HTML syntax. Eventually, because of the inconsistencies in legacy HTML, both these features (beautify and validate) were downplayed and one was dropped entirely. In the new Arachnophilia (version 5.3 and newer), because of the consistency provided by XHTML, HTML Beautify and HTML Validate are separate functions, and both work as intended if the page contains valid XHTML syntax.

If you want to keep your pages as they are, e.g not convert to XHTML, but want to use the advanced Arachnophilia features, just make these changes:
  • Make sure that every tag in your page either has a closing partner:
    <open>content</close>
    or is self-closing:
    <self-contained tag/>
  • Examples of tags that should have closing partners, but did not in earlier versions of Arachnophilia, incude <li></li> and <option></option>.
  • Examples of tags that should be made <self-closing/> include <img ... />, <input ... />, <frame .../>, <meta ... /> and about a half-dozen others. The point is there should never be a tag without <either> a </partner> or the special <self-closing syntax/>.
  • If this system is followed, you can update your pages with a minimum of effort, and your pages will be more acceptable to browsers as well as Arachnophilia.
This is a bit of an editorial comment. I strongly recommend that the reader consider converting his or her pages to XHTML. This change allows much greater control over page form and content, and will prevent the eventual abandonment of Web pages that are not internally consistent.

As time has passed, I have done all in my power to automate Web page creation, and Arachnophilia represents some steps in this direction (although script writing is the primary approach to automation). In the case of legacy HTML Web pages, it is very difficult to apply automated methods because page content cannot be relied on to follow consistent rules. XHTML was created to correct the glaring deficiencies in HTML, and Arachnophiila is now oriented toward XHTML, to the degree that some of its advanced features won't work with HTML any more.

 

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