Arachnophilia 5 represents one of those departure points in the history of this program, points at which it is necessary to make a fresh start. Specifically, the changes in this version are so far-reaching --- including a rewrite of most of the macro set and the documentation --- that it is necessary to delete the Arachnophilia user directory to realize the full benefit of the changes.

To make this change, please read these instructions and then:

  • Exit Arachnophilia
  • Delete the directory (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia
  • Re-run Arachnophilia

After taking these steps, the user will see a reinstallation of the Arachnophilia user files --- that's a sign that the deletion was carried out successfully. By the way, this is the correct approach to dealing with problems that seem insurmountable --- to overcome various problems that might come up, simply delete (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia and run Arachnophilia again.

Arachnophilia has become an XHTML workshop.

A new version of HTML has appeared, named "XHTML," that has so many advantages over HTML that Arachnophilia has been completely reworked to take advantage of it. Elsewhere in these directions, and in Arachnophilia's menus and prompts, the term HTML appears, but remember that this is simply a syntactical convenience --- it refers to XHTML.

Earlier Arachnophilia difficulties with beautifying and formatting HTML, and analyzing Web pages for tag errors, have been corrected in this version. In past Arachnophilia versions, certain features had to be dropped because they couldn't coexist with the internal ambiguities and inconsistencies of straight HTML. In the new Arachnophilia version, the best of those features has been restored. Specifically, HTML Beautify now works reliably and HTML Validate --- a tool for finding and correcting structural errors, a feature not seen since Arachnophilia 4.0 --- is back and works very well.

XHTML is internally consistent in a way that HTML cannot be, and it greatly simplifies the task of Web page design and maintenance. Arachnophilia is now structured around XHTML and it can help you convert your pages from HTML to XHTML.

What's New:

  • Replaced Windows startup method after discovering that Microsoft has dropped support for Java.