Options for Family Map

Data set Case-sensitibe name for the data set, uploaded to the tyoma.com server. It is a good practice to restrict name to the alpha-numeric characters, including undescore "_", otherwise good results cannot be quarantied. No warning is given when you misspell the data set name, but the default data set "tyoma" is loaded.
Person ID The initial person from the data set above. Normally, you are getting both data set and person Id from the family map author. I would say, those two parametrs are a kind of mandatory fields. In case you know only data set name, placing Id to 1 is a good initial guess. You also can ask the program to select some Person Id from the data set.
The field must be an integer, with one exception: the old GEDCOM style indicator of person's ID in the format @I123@ is also accepted.
Language The language of the Family Map. Default selection in most cases gives English for the labels and family relations calculations. If you can read Cyrilic and have some Russian heritage, you can switch into the Russian mode. For the data set created with the one of Cyrilic encodings, the default mode is Russian, so you can set language back to English.
Legacy mode The great majority of the modern browsers are capable of displaing formated XML web pages. In case when page behaves strange, buttons does not work, nothing or all displayed, etc., you can try to turn legacy mode On. In legacy mode server makes all operations on its side, sending final file in html format to the browser. Althouth this mode is much more conventional, it is much less convient, because the size of the html file can be as much as 50(!) larger compare to xml file. For the large data sets, like default "tyoma" and the modem connections, the loading of the initial map would be rather slow in legacy mode and visitor have no fun on reloading all data again on changing key person.
Legacy mode is automatically turned on for Internet Explorer 4 and 5, althought some Internet Explorer 5.5 are capable operating in the xml mode.
Encoding Encoding of the data set. When it Cyrilic (ISO or Windows) and clearly specified in the data set ("CHAR" field), auto encoding takes value from the data set. If encoding in the data set is unknown or undefined, the programm tryes to guess it, setting it to the Windows Cyrilic when unusally large percentage of the characters in the names are from the upper half of the ASCII table is found and to the Latin 1 otherwise. You can always force the programm to use particular encoding.
The list of the possible encoding is actually missing several important entries:
  • ansel - The standard encoding for the GEDCOM files. Real legacy encoding, not supported by Java standards. Still have to be done.
  • UTF - The standard encoding for the modern multi-language programs. Will be added soon.
  • DOS, Mac - It is always possible to get away with Windows encoding...
Browser The two categories of supported browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, (including old versions) and Gecko-based browsers: Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6 and up. For the other browsers you can try either options, switching on legacy mode. For example, Safari looks OK in legacy mode for Firefox.