To display the contents of a Web directory enter a URL in the address field and click Go or press Enter. Be patient.
When you enter a URL in the address field WebLS fetches up to a 1000 different URLs of that website and uses them to construct a file tree. When the file tree is finished a list of subdirectories and files is displayed.
Whenever you go to another website (host) the file tree is purged to spare memory.
The Back and Forward actions work as you would expect. So does opening a link in a new tab/window, but the application in the new tab/window needs to rebuild the file tree. The currently viewed URL is encoded into the address bar of your browser, it is safe to copy it or refresh the page.
When exploring a large website WebLS fetches 10 fairly large documents for every query made. This may take a considerable amount of time. You can set a limit to the amount of documents the application fetches before displaying a file list using the interactive progress bar. The amount of documents can be seen as the completeness of the listings.
Each part of the progress bar represents a document WebLS needs to retrieve to build the file tree. When a query is active a block of the progress bar becomes green every time a document arrives. When you click the n-th block only the first n documents will be fetched in consecutive queries. It is always possible to increase the completeness after having done a query by selecting a larger limit and pressing Go.
You can interrupt a large query by clicking the progress bar while the query is active, the results that are currently available are displayed immediately. The query still continues in the background. In this case the Refresh button becomes active to allow you to see the results that were retrieved after the current list was made.