ViolaWWW

ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

(though to a limited audience) which, until Mosaic

Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. It was recommended by CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

at that time.

Background

James Gillies and Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau , born 26 January 1947, is a Belgian informatics engineer and computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web.-Biography:...

in How the Web was Born offer an history of the development of Viola. Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei

Pei-Yuan Wei

Pei-Yuan Wei is the creator of ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986 and received his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.-Controversy:...

, who at the time was a student at the Experimental Computing Facility at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

HyperCard

His interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard

HyperCard

HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...

which he discovered in 1989. Gillies and Cailliau quote Wei on this discovery: "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac...and I didn't even have a Mac" (p. 213). Only having access to X terminal

X terminal

In computing, an X terminal is a display/input terminal for X Window System client applications. X terminals enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1990s when they offered a lower total cost of ownership alternative to a full Unix workstation....

s, he (in 1990) created the first version of Viola for them: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows[sic]" (p. 213).

Viola 0.8

He released Viola 0.8 in 1991, and then after graduating began to develop Viola even further while working with "Berkeley's Experimental Computing Facility" as well as at a few start ups. Later, he would be funded by O'Reilly Books, the technical publisher, which used the software to help demonstrate its Global Network Navigator

Global Network Navigator

The Global Network Navigator was the first commercial web publicationand the first web site to offer clickable advertisements, now commonly referred to as "banner ads." The first such internet ad was sold by GNN to Heller Ehrman LLP....

site.

The World Wide Web

At this time, as Gillies and Cailliau indicate, Pei Wei's major goal was to create a version of Viola for the Internet:

what Pei Wei wanted to do next was run it over the Internet. X-Window [sic] was a Unix-based system so it had TCP/IP built in and the Internet was a logical step. The question was how to transport his Viola pages across the Internet. He was on the verge of an independent invention of networked hypertext. 'And that's when I read Tim's

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

about the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

' he explains 'The URL was very, very clever, it was perfectly what I needed. He dropped Tim a line saying that he was thinking of writing a browser for X. 'Sounds like a good idea,' said Tim in a reply posted to www-talk on 9 December. Four Days later, Pei Wei told www-talk that he had made a browser" (p.214).

Created in 1992, it was the first browser to add extended functionality such as embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. According to Gillies and Cailliau "Viola was to become the first X-browser to make any impact, but even his early versions went down well at CERN

CERN

...As this ViolaWWW developed, it was to set the standard for everything to follow it..." (p. 214). Ed Kroll also highlighted it in his popular 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog

Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog

The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, by Ed Krol, was published in September 1992 by O'Reilly. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog was the "first popular book about the medium" and "was later selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most...

Graphics

As ViolaWWW developed, it began to look more like HyperCard:

It had a bookmark facility so that you could keep track of your favourite pages. It had buttons for going backwards and forwards and a history feature to keep track of the places you had been. As time went on, it acquired tables and graphics and by May 1993 it could even run programs." (p.214).

Specifics

It was based on the Viola toolkit, which is a tool for the development and support of visual interactive media applications, with a multimedia web browser being a possible application. Viola ran under the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

and could be used to build complex hypermedia applications that were beyond HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

3.0 (the latest version of HTML at that time), with features like applets and other interactive content as early as 1992.

Ahead of its time

Viola was interesting because it was the first web browser to have the following features:

client-side document insertion, predating frames
Framing (World Wide Web)
When using web browsers, the terms frames or frameset refer to the display of two or more web pages or media elements displayed side-by-side within the same browser window...

, or syndication via javascript output writing, which are used commonly today.

Viola-style document embedding	Object method

a simple stylesheet mechanism used for inserting style information such as fonts, color and alignments into a document. This was implemented in Viola well before CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

was developed in 1998:

A viola-style stylesheet	A CSS stylesheet
(BODY,INPUT,P FGColor=black BGColor=grey70 BDColor=grey70 align=left (H1 FGColor=white BGColor=red BDColor=black align=center	body, input, p { color: black; background-color: #707070; text-align: left; } h1 { color: white; background-color: red; border: solid 1px black; text-align: center; }

A viola-style stylesheet

A CSS stylesheet



 (BODY,INPUT,P   FGColor=black

                 BGColor=grey70

                 BDColor=grey70

                 align=left



 (H1             FGColor=white

                 BGColor=red

                 BDColor=black

                 align=center



 body, input, p {

  color: black;

  background-color: #707070;

  text-align: left;

}



 h1 {

  color: white;

  background-color: red;

  border: solid 1px black;

  text-align: center;

}

a sidebar panel used for displaying "meta" information, intra document navigational links, and other information, similar to (but not as sophisticated as) features found in several modern browsers.
a scripting language
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

that can be accessed from an HTML document, such that an HTML document can embed highly interactive scripts/applets. This can be seen as the precursor to JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

and embedded objects.

	ViolaWWW method	JavaScript JavaScript JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.... equivalent
Scripting	\class {txtDisp} \name {showTime} \script { switch (arg[0]) { case "tick": set("content"), date); after(1000, self, "tick"); return; break; case "init": after(1000, self, "tick"); break; } usual; } \width {100} \height {50} \	function showTimeInDoc { var theTime = document. getElementById('theTime'); var tDate = new Date; theTime.innerHTML= tDate.getHours + ":" + tDate.getMinutes + ":" + tDate.getSeconds; setTimeout("showTimeInDoc", 1000); }
Embedding a script into a web page	And, the time now is: HREF="showTime.v">

ViolaWWW method

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

equivalent

Scripting



\class {txtDisp}

\name {showTime}

\script { switch (arg[0]) {

  case "tick":

    set("content"), date);

    after(1000, self, "tick");

    return; break;

  case "init":

    after(1000, self, "tick");

    break;

  }

  usual;

}

\width {100}

\height {50} \



function showTimeInDoc {

  var theTime =

   document.

    getElementById('theTime');

  var tDate = new Date;

  theTime.innerHTML=

   tDate.getHours

   + ":" + tDate.getMinutes

   + ":" + tDate.getSeconds;

  setTimeout("showTimeInDoc",

   1000);

}

Embedding a script into a web page











And, the time now is:


HREF="showTime.v">

Mosaic

While ViolaWWW opened the door to the World Wide Web, its limitations (including the fact that it was only implemented on the X Window System) meant it could not compete with Mosaic

Mosaic (web browser)

, the browser which brought the world wide web into the mainstream, because it was easier to install on the computers most people were using. According to Freedman in the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, "Mosaic was 'the' application that caused interest in the World Wide Web to explode. Originally developed for UNIX

Unix

, it was soon ported to Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

" (p. 629).

Microsoft v. Eolas and ViolaWWW prior art

Because of ViolaWWW, Microsoft was allowed a retrial in February 2005 in the Microsoft v. Eolas case. The original ruling would have cost software giant Microsoft $521 million in damages. Eolas Technologies and the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing patents with the Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

web browser. The case revolved around a patent held by Eolas and the University which claims to cover ways of making other software work seamlessly with web browsers.

A retrial was allowed after the first court ruling in ignored two key arguments put forward by Microsoft. Microsoft had wanted to show the court ViolaWWW as prior art

Prior art

Prior art , in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality...

, since it was created in 1993 at the University of California, a year before the patent was filed. Microsoft had also suggested that Michael David Doyle, Eolas' founder and a former University of California researcher, had intentionally concealed his knowledge of ViolaWWW when filing the patent claim.

External links

The Viola Home Page
Personal Comments on Eolas vs Microsoft, and the Viola Prior Art
Presentation- Extensibility in WWW Browsers
[ftp://ftp.cuhk.hk/pub/packages/info-systems/www/viola/ Download Viola]

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.