News Page Guide

The news page in the launcher is shown using Java's Swing web browser, which is fairly poor. It supports a basic level of CSS but has no or minimal support of CSS3.

In addition, make sure that your pages are not too complex. Your news page should be specifically tailored for the launcher (don't just point the news page at some existing page).

What Not To Do

• Don't try to use shortcut hex colors in CSS (i.e. #fff)

Transparent Background

The launcher is configured to have the web browser be transparent, so unless you set a background color on the webpage, the background of the launcher will show through. Transparency is desired for the Fancy Launcher, but if you are using the regular boring launcher, you should probably set a background.

<style>
body { background: #ffffff; }
</style>

Launcher Version

In launcher.properties is a newsUrl parameter. It can have a "%s" that will be replaced with a (URL-encoded) copy of the launcher version.

For example:

newsUrl=http://example.com/news.html?version=%s

Troubleshooting

If no page loads at all (it's blank), you are probably using an overly complex page. This generally doesn't happen if you built a page from scratch specifically for the browser.