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When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers
by Millennium 10y ago
When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText didn't support inline images, so WorldWideWeb relegated images to separate windows at the time. It did eventually become a graphical browser in this regard, once NSText had the necessary inline image support, but ViolaWWW beat it to the punch.
You don't hear much about graphical browsers anymore, not because they died out but because they became such an overwhelming majority that it no longer made much sense to make any distinction. But a few non-graphical browsers are still in development; Lynx is probably the most famous of them.
- Zelphyr 10y agoIs the original source code that Tim Berners-Lee wrote available anywhere? I would think it would be an interesting read.
- zackbloom 10y agoYep! http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT/ http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT... Interestingly, some of the code "still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact."
- glitch 10y agoAlso check out https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/
- brett40324 10y agoThanks! That IS great to check out. It took him many rounds of proposals at CERN to finally be able to realize his ideas. The details of it all is an epic read.
- vlehto 10y agoIn Aalto Uni there is popular legend about Erwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise I don't know what to believe.