NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows User's Guide

User-configurable Menus and Hotlists

NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows can accommodate up to twenty user-configurable menus and submenus. NCSA distributes it with one top-level user-configurable menu, the Starting Points menu, and about four submenu s. See ``User-configurable Menus'' for information on adding, deleting, and editing user-configurable menus.

Note that user-configurable menus are easy to change. If you acquired your copy of NCSA Mosaic by any means other than directly from NCSA, your copy may not have the Starting Points menu described below or your Starting Points menu may differ from the one described. Furthermore, it may have additional user-configurable menus that appear between the Annotate and Help menus.

NCSA Mosaic incorporates the use of hotlists, user-configurable lists that make it easier for a user to find important documents. All user-configurable menus can be used as hotlists. See ``Using, Creating, and Editing Hotlists.''

Starting Points Menu

The Starting Points menu, as distributed by NCSA, provides links to several documents or gateways that serve as excellent jumping off points to the Internet. For users unfamiliar with the Internet, many of these provide excellent starting points for Internet exploration; experienced users may be able to use some of these starting points as shortcuts to reach material they are already familiar with.

The Starting Points menu contains several entries, including the following items:

Starting Points Document
This selection loads the document Starting Points for Internet Exploration. This document contains links to a variety of Internet services.
NCSA Mosaic Demo Document
This selection loads the document NCSA Mosaic Demo Document. The Internet data sources that this document points to were selected because they illustrate the capabilities of NCSA Mosaic and the World Wide Web.
The Starting Points menu, with the Gopher Servers submenu

NCSA Mosaic's What's New Page
This selection loads the document What's New with NCSA Mosaic which points to new Web servers and to many new and notable Internet data displays. Most of this document is organized by date; new displays have been listed since June 1993 as NCSA staff became aware of them.

The What's New page includes links to university data displays, government displays, technology displays related to the Internet, and business displays in fields directly related to Internet support and development. NCSA used to accept a What's New entry for any new display that was accessible via the World Wide Web. The past year has seen exponential growth on the Internet and even greater growth on the Web and NCSA can no longer list every commercial entry.

A particularly useful source available from this document is the Internet Resources Meta-Index, a meta-index of the various resource directories and indices available on the Internet. This document provides a text searching capability in its interface to various resource guides and searchable databases on the Internet.


National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu