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WWW reality check (was: RE: Why I should not use DHTML ?)
On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Chen Shapira wrote:
> actually breaking a standard is what started graphical browsers/graphical
> web.
> back then (when men were real men and wrote their own standards) a committee
> were debating on how to embed non-text into the html standard. a small
> company jumped forward - against all standards added its own <img> tag. the
> rest is history.
if we want to keep things properly ordered, then, as far as my memory
serves, the first browser that supported the combination of graphics and
text, was the NCSA Mosaic, and it is this browser, and this project, that
actually got netscape started. marc andreeson was a student at UIUC, and
wrote NCSA mosaic together with a few others in a few month, as some kind
of project there). After understanding the potential for this product, he
went out to form netscape communications, Inc.
and doing some web search: according to netscape's data, the company was
founded on april 1994 (see
http://www.netscape.com/company/about/backgrounder.html, look in the
'Growth' section). now, read the message whose copy i found at
http://www.otol.fi/tieli/9310/0000.html , that shows that by that time,
mosaic for windows had the option to disable loading of inlined images
already added.....
as for netscape's attitude:
when netscape's beta versions started coming out the first that i remember
seeing being largely distribution was version 0.96) - mosaic was quite
superior to the netscape navigator, and netscape then decided to harness
the power of the internet - they said that when the software would be
realsed (v1.0), it will be free for non-commercial use. this resulted many
people downloading and trying their browser, and sending them zillions of
bug reports... and then - netscape blew it. they changed the license
agreement (i think this was done on version 0.98) to state that the
browser would be freely available to people who do not work, or who work
in academic institutes and schools. if you worked in a commercial company,
you'd not be able to use it without purchasing the product, even if you
want to use it at home for non-commercial purposes.
this resulted in large bashing of netscape on usenet (which was the MAJOR
place for discussion forums back then - there were NO such thing as
web-based discussion forums), and calls to boycott netscape due to what
was persuived as missleading the public in order to get a large and cheap
testing group...
also, netsacpe indeed pushed out all the other browser writers that
started popping up after netsacpe created the market (such as mosaic by
spy-glass, mosaic by Ftp software in israel, the multi-lingual mosaic by
Kivun software in israel, the web browser from the chameleon package of
netmanage and so on...). netscape pushed them out by constantly adding
more and more tags that were not in the standard, and thus once many sites
started using netscape specific tags, usage of other browsers would cause
improper viewing of the sites - which would lead users to dumping those
browsers and downloading netscape from netscape's ftp site (and manny
mirrors) instead. the true thing is that netscape was indeed far better
then the competing browsers, althought it took them quite some time to
bypass the NCSA mosaic (at least its windows version - the X windows
version's development was halted long before they stopped developing the
windows version).
guy
"For world domination - press 1,
or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy
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