What's new in '92

Here's the latest (that we know) about W3. The High-Energy Physics world got its first official announcement of W3 in the CERN computer newsletter released at Christmas, with an introductory article. However, there are already many users of W3 outside HEP!

New browser

The new year starts with a release (version 1.1 - our first official "version1" release) of the line mode browser. This has protocol code in for a wealth of new information, with:

Direct access to internet news groups
Direct access to " gopher " campus-wide information systems etc. (Gopher is system similar to W3 but using a web of menus and plain text files rather than hypertext. It is all readable as hypertext using W3)
Browsing of remote directories using FTP. Before, files could be read - now you can browse around as well! Any FTP site becomes a W3 information source.
Follow links directly to telnet (and rlogin) sites. This allows hypertexts to point to online communications facilities which don't have servers.
Extensibility using gateways - you can configure www to use specific gateways for any access protocol which might turn up in the future which it can't handle directly.

The user interface is slightly improved, and you can save a document to a file or pipe, or print it (under unix).

The browser version can be picked up by anonymous FTP in the usual way including source binaries for several platforms.

Those who have built other hypertext systems (such as Hyperbole and Viola) on top of the www browser will immediately gain access to the all this newly accessible information.

W3 at SLAC

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the W3 server for the "SPIRES" High-Energy Physics preprint database at the Stanford Linear ACcelerator lab comes news from Paul Kunz that the line mode browser is installed on all unix systems at SLAC. Happy browsing, folks.

Browsing on VM/CMS

The IBM mainframe at CERN now has a copy of the w3 browser (v0.14) running in line mode. We are considering ways to make it more full-screen in the VM style.

Browsing under X with viola

A version of www running in the "Viola" hypertext system looks good - I just saw it running on an apollo and on a decstation. We hope to release it soon with the coming new version of viola.

Conferences

The W3 demonstration had an enthusiastic reception at " HyperText'91 " in San Antonio, Texas.

As I write Jean-Francois is presenting it live at the Software Engineering and AI for High-Energy Physics workshop in La Londe, France. We've also been asked to demonstrate, as well as present a paper, at the Joint European Networking Conference (JENC3) in Innsbruck, Austria, in May. _________________________________________________________________

(next issue: April)

Tim BL