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You omitted the first browser, Silversmith. From Wikipedia, "History of the Browser": "Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987.
by jbottoms 7y ago
You omitted the first browser, Silversmith. From Wikipedia, "History of the Browser":
"Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987.[9] The browser, based on SGML tags,[10] used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents.[11] The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names."
Silversmith implemented a portion of Ted's vision and I have discussed it with him from time to time. Ted developed Hypertext fixed links for books and we extended that to Hypertext links across the Internet, along with returns to multiple sources which was not done in books.
I was not able to get funding to continue the work. TimBL's innovation was in 1.) soliciting funding from the 10 large companies that funded the Web, and 2.) embedding advertising on web pages and in the content. But along with this was the funder's specification of how the WWW should work.
My descriptions of Silversmith were removed from wikipedia at W3c's request and Silversmith is now conveniently a "precursor" and most people believe Netscape was the first, when in fact it was released about 8 years after Silversmith The government was the early adopter and we released 4 different browsers in the first year, the last of which was a semantic browser for the U.S. Army Material Command. Silversmith included a browse-able index of each document, automatic markup of submitted texts, a parser to automatically check the page composition and it was a distributed system. The 5th browser was Erwise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise, which Tim looked at before he started on his browser, the W3c implementation (the 6th). He declined to pursue it because the comments in the code were written in Finnish. Our other browsers were for the DoD Computer Aided Logistics Support (CALS) documents, for DoD Tech Manuals, and one for Old Norse documents written in Old Norse.I designed the browser to aid in the development of ontologies for AI. We have been working in the field for 33 years. My hope is that our next browser will include Ted's vision of draft versions and payments.
- hedora 7y agoAre there any links to silvesmith resources? It sounds pretty amazing, and it would be nice if it were written down somewhere. I’d be curious to see what was forgotten along the way to v6. Also, I see the Erwise Wikipedia screenshot uses the phrase “world wide web” in the authors box, which is kinda funny, since the article goes on to say Tim Berners Lee later invented the world wide web.