1/87.3.1 The WWW Browser Mosaic from NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) began a project to create an interface to WWW shortly after the group at CERN proposed their WWW. Some graphical browsers were developed for XWindows and NeXT systems. Like Viola or Midas, hyperlinks were represented through underlining or by using different colors. With a mouse or other pointing device you could follow links by just clicking on them. Then in 1993 NCSA developed a versatile, multi-platform interface to the World Wide Web and called it Mosaic.
Here are the main features of Mosaic:
- allows the display of hypertext and hypermedia documents;
- users use a mouse-driven graphical interface;
- uses many different fonts and displays text in bold, italics or strike-through styles;
- layout elements such as paragraphs, lists, numbered and bulleted lists and quoted paragraphs can also be displayed easily;
- supports sounds and movies (MPEG-1 and QuickTime);
- shows layout elements such as lists, paragraphs, numbered and bulletin lists and quoted paragraphs;
- allows you to create and follow hyperlinks;
- understands the most important Internet protocols such as FTP, Gopher, Telnet, WAIS, NNTP;
- supports current standards of HTTP and HTML;
- can store and retrieve a list of document viewed for future use;
- can keep a history of traversed hyperlinks.