### A Message from the HighWire Development Team

Welcome to the latest release of HighWire, version 0.3.0

First you are probably asking why the jump in version numbers. Wasn't this supposed to be version 0.2.8? Well it was for awhile, then the decision was made to move the version up for two solid reasons. The first reason is that there has been substantial work done in the code and some members of the team argued that this validated more than just an incremental increase. This has some merit, there is also a secondary reason that helped seal the deal as we say in the US.

Begining with this release, we will follow a numbering convention close to that used by many other open source projects. Internal test versions will have a beginning odd subversion number, external release versions will have a beginning even subversion number. Examples for this would be 0.3.1x (where x would be any other number) a test snapshot or 0.3.2 which would signify a release version. This is primarily to facilitate a more regimented testing scheme and will allow us to more easily identify when a bug has entered the code.

Now on the subject of bugs, let me personally apologize to anyone that was frustated by the bugs that crept into the 0.2.7 release. It was accidental and we were unaware at the time that some of our standard testers were unavailable, a bad assumption was made that no complaints from them meant that they had encountered no problems. We will try to be a bit more strident in the future. If you encounter any problems please let us know as soon as possible.

So what does that mean for this release?

Well the delayed bug reports came in after some major changes were started in certain sections of the code. That development was frozen until such a time as this release was made. This is mainly of note in the CSS specificity code (or weighting system). The new system will make some sites look much better with CSS than they ever have before. However since it's not perfected yet, it also has some strange effects on more complex sites. This will be improved in future versions, but we didn't want to leave half the user base stuck at version 0.2.6 until this new code was finished. So don't be surprised when sometimes a font is much larger than it used to be or is a completely different color than it should be.

Since we were in a freeze for bug fixes, we got several put in place for this release. The first step was the elimination of the bugs that came into place with the christmas snapshot, where we were greatly aided by stghost who put in hours of tracing, testing and coding to help find and eliminate them. If you see him online, be sure to thank him! The problematic VA_START was replaced with the correct value, so some users should finally be able to launch those external applications that never worked. And the download manager was fixed so that saving from a http1.1 server doesn't litter the file with chunk headers. There were several other small bugs that caused the occaisional crash squashed as well.

We hope you will find the end result to be a pleasing upgrade.

Main changes and additions in this versions:

- Various bugs introduced in the 0.2.7 release fixed
- Downloaded manager handles chunked transfers now
- One of the long standing bugs in the VA system fixed
- Table size handling improved
- Highwire now attempts to interpret unterminated strings
- PX sizes reduced to more closely match IE/FF display
- CSS parser has been extended and is a bit more robust
- CSS speficity system in place, but still not perfect
- CSS keyword Display: inline has some early first implementation
- Support for CSS keywords border-top, border-bottom, border-left, border-right on many tags
- Several more (but less obvious) bugs fixed.

As usual, more details of changes can be seen in the Change.Log file.

– And as always for your help and support, Thank you,

– HighWire Development Team