Version 3.0 User's Guide
Cumulative Effects of Commands	Previous | Next Contents

It is extremely important to remember that the SHOW command will never cause a HIDE and vice-versa. For instance,

    <SHOW_DOMAIN BEGINS 123.45>

will show text following it for those in the domain "123.45", but it will not hide text from those outside the domain. To do this, you must precede the SHOW command with an unconditional HIDE. To show only to clients in the domain 123.45, use this instead:

    <HIDE><SHOW_DOMAIN BEGINS 123.45>

Think of the text of your document as a stream of text flowing through a faucet. When you use a conditional SHOW command, you are saying "turn the faucet on if this is true" but you are not saying "turn the faucet off if it is not true". The same rule applies to HIDE.

What this allows you to do is use the commands in a cumulative way. This is best seen by an example:

    <SHOW>    Here is the first line, visible to everyone.
    <HIDE_DOMAIN IS some.domain>    This is hidden from users in "some.domain".
    <HIDE_DOMAIN IS another.domain>    Hidden from "another.domain" AND "some.domain".
    <SHOW>    This last line can be seen by everyone.

If we had wanted the sixth line to be hidden ONLY from "another.domain", the HTML would have been:

    <SHOW>    Here is the first line, visible to everyone.
    <HIDE_DOMAIN IS some.domain>    This is hidden from users on "some.domain".
    <SHOW><HIDE_DOMAIN IS another.domain>    Hidden from "another.domain" ONLY.
    <SHOW>    This last line can be seen by everyone.

The extra SHOW command "turns the HTML on" before the HIDE command shuts it back of for the desired users. This can get a little confusing, but there is a simple rule.

When you want to specify "Hide only from ...", use:

    <SHOW><HIDE ...>

And when you want to specify "Show only to...", use:

    <HIDE><SHOW ...>

This is very important, as the next example shows:

    <SHOW>    This line is viewable by the world!
    <SHOW_DAY BEGINS SAT SUN>    This line is ALSO visible to the world.

In this example, since everyone could already view the HTML text, SHOW_DAY didn't do anything. To do what we want, to show the line only on the weekends, this example should be:

    <SHOW>    This line is viewable by the world!
    <HIDE><SHOW_DAY BEGINS SAT SUN>    This line is visible ONLY on the weekend.
    <SHOW>

By hiding first, we block access from everyone and then let people see the text ONLY when we want.

Why does NetCloak work like this?

Because, despite the fact that it takes a little getting used to, it gives you a lot more flexibility. For example, let's say you wanted to have a section of your document available only to your company all the time. The rest of the world could see the section during non-business hours only. In this case, you could do this:

    <SHOW>    This line is always available to everyone
    <HIDE>    <SHOW_DOMAIN IS my.local.domain>    <SHOW_DAY BEGINS SAT SUN>    <SHOW_TIME GT= 19:00>    <SHOW_TIME LT  06:00>    This line is available to my local users all the time, and to the rest of the world during off hours.
    <SHOW>

This example first hides the HTML text, then turns viewing back on for each specific case.

Copyright © 1996-1999 Maxum Development Corporation http://www.maxum.com/	Previous | Next Contents