ViolaWWW explained

ViolaWWW is a discontinued web browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN,^[1] where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.

Viola

Released in 1992, Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, a member of the Experimental Computing Facility (XCF) at the University of California, Berkeley.^[3] Viola was a UNIX-based programming/scripting language; the acronym stood for "Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application".

Pei's interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard, which he first encountered in 1989. Of that, Pei said, "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". Only having access to X terminals, Pei, in 1990, created the first version of Viola for such terminals: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them..."^[4]

Pei released Viola 0.8 in 1991.

History of ViolaWWW

After graduating, Pei developed Viola further while working with the XCF and startups.^{[4] [5]} Later, he would be funded by O'Reilly Books, the technical publisher, which used the software to help demonstrate its Global Network Navigator site.^[6] His major goal was to create a version of Viola for the Internet:

Released in 1992, ViolaWWW was the first browser to add extended functionality such as embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. Early versions were received well at CERN.^[4] Ed Krol also highlighted the browser in his popular 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.

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

ViolaWWW 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 and could be used to build complex hypermedia applications with features like applets and other interactive content as early as 1992.^[7]

Firsts

Viola was the first web browser to have the following features:^[8]

• client-side document insertion, predating frames, or syndication via JavaScript output writing, which are used commonly today.

• a simple stylesheet mechanism used for inserting style information such as fonts, color and alignments into a document.^[9] This was implemented in Viola well before CSS was developed in 1998:

Notes and References

1. Web site: What were the first WWW browsers? . . Tim Berners-Lee . Tim Berners-Lee . 2010-06-15.
2. See Viola in a Nutshell for details.
3. Web site: ViolaWWW Hypertext Browser. 28 July 2010. Pei-Yuan Wei. Pei-Yuan Wei.
4. Book: James Gillies. R. Cailliau. How the Web was born: the story of the World Wide Web. 2000. Oxford University Press. 978-0-19-286207-5. 213–217.
5. Web site: WWW people. World Wide Web Consortium. 28 July 2010.
6. News: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book . Forbes . Tim . O'Reilly . 23 February 2009.
7. Web site: What is Web 2.0? - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software . https://web.archive.org/web/20120215100147/http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/51/webexny2010_what-is-web-20.pdf . 2012-02-15 . Tim O’Reilly . O'Reilly Media.
8. Web site: Berners-Lee. Tim. A Brief History of the Web. World Wide Web Consortium. 17 August 2010. Tim Berners-Lee. c.1993. 9 August 1997.
9. Web site: Chapter 14, Stylesheet . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20220118233304/http://viola.org/viola/book/chp14.html . 2022-01-18 . Viola in a Nutshell.
10. Web site: Chapter 13, Extensibility . https://web.archive.org/web/20220118223211/http://viola.org/viola/book/chp13.html . 2022-01-18 . Viola in a Nutshell.
11. Web site: ViolaWWW . webdesignmuseum.org . Web Design Museum . 17 February 2022.
12. Web site: Mosaic -- The First Global Web Browser . 28 July 2010.
13. Freedman, Alan. Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, 9th Edition. New York: Osborne, 2001, p. 629
14. Web site: Eolas Technologies, Inc., and The Regents of the University of California v. Microsoft Corporation. 99 C 626
15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4314989.stm Court stays $521m Microsoft fine
16. News: High-profile, 8-year patent dispute settled . Seattle Post-Intelligencer . 2007-08-30 .
17. News: Samuels. Julie. Why the Patent System Doesn't Play Well with Software: If Eolas Went the Other Way. Electronic Frontier Foundation. February 15, 2012.