3.3.6.4 Mosaic

>> Ressourcen > Theses > Persché, Richar[..] > 3 Hypermedia Sy[..] > 3.3 The World W[..] > 3.3.6 WWW Brows[..] > 3.3.6.4 Mosaic

8/10

3.3.6.4 Mosaic

**Figure 3.1:** The Mosaic WWW browser. The left window shows the hierarchical history of Mosaic.
$\begin{figure} \begin{center} \leavevmode \psfig {file=mosaic.ps} \end{center}\end{figure}$

The NCSA (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications) has released a new version of Mosaic, which was, indeed, the first graphical browser for the WWW back in 1993. Mosaic 3.0 has some features which greatly differ from NN and MSIE. It provides a hierarchical history structure (see Figure 3.1), which makes moving forward and backward through the browsing history much easier compared to a linear history, as implemented by Netscape and Microsoft. Consider following example:

You visit documents 1, 2, 3, and 4, in this order. Then you go back to document 2 using the back button twice. If you then go to document 5, document 3 and 4 will disappear in a linear history, but will stay in a hierarchical history where a new branch will be created for document 5. Furthermore, this tree of documents, produced during one session, can be saved for later use. As far as I am concerned, this feature should have been part of every browser.

Another feature of Mosaic I want to mention here is the collaborative session. Mosaic provides a mode for synchronous browsing of the WWW. A follow me mode is implemented where participants of the session can move other participants to the same WWW page they have on their browser. Additionally, a communication window appears which allows participants to communicate synchronously.

Mosaic would provide the perfect basis for a browser used for online education but, unfortunately, Mosaic does not currently support Java, yet, and thus is not suitable for the teleteaching project explained in the last Chapter of my thesis.