                                            W3C Reference Library Release Notes
   W3ClibwwwRELEASE
   
                           LIBRARY 4.1 RELEASE NOTES
                                       
RELEASE 4.1B1 MAY 20 1996

  New Features
  
      Introduced GNU autoconf configure script for compiling on Unix platforms
      instead of the old BUILD script. This should make it a lot easier to
      compile on Unix as we get all the advantages of GNU autoconf.
      
      Introduction of the HTUserprofile Class which keeps track of a "user"
      known to the Library
      
      New access authentication interface allowing for dynamic registration of
      new access authentication mechanisms. It provides an easy API for hooking
      in new schemes.
      
      Improved handling of trace messages which allows for easy redirection of
      trace messages
      
      Support for registration of content coders/decoders and content transfer
      encoders/decoders. This is done the same way as for media types by
      registering a set of streams that can handle the various encodings.
      
      Support for _chunked_ decoding
      
      Introduction of the HTHost Class which keeps track of information about
      remote hosts
      
      The DNS Class has been simplified to handle DNS queries only. All
      additional information about the remote host is defined by the HThost
      Class.
      
      We have a new HTEvent module which allows for dynamic registration of an
      event manager. This will make it much easier to use external event
      managers together with libwww. If you wish to continue to use the event
      loop from HTEvntrg, you must register it explicitly with HTEventInit. To
      activate this event loop (currently only necessary in MSWindows), you
      must call HTEventrgInit. Both of these calls are demonstrated in
      HTBrowse.
      
      The HTStream module has been created containing a set of basiv streams
      such as an error stream etc.
      
      Introduction of the HTTransport Class. This allows for dynamic
      registration of transport protocols such as for example the W3Mux
      protocol, TCP access, local file access etc.
      
      All MIME parsing is now done with registered parsers. The HTMIME module
      only unwraps the  MIME header fields and calls the best parser. The
      header parsing origonally done in HTMIME can be found in HTInit.c and is
      registered with HTMIMEInit.
      
  Bug Fixes
  
      A host name is not expanded to a fully qualified domain name as it is not
      reliable enough
      
   
   ___________________________________
   
                                                 Henrik Frystyk, libwww@w3.org,
                                                                               
              @(#) $Id: ReleaseNotes.html,v 1.33 1996/06/10 00:20:52 eric Exp $
                                                                               
   
