How do you do these things??? With WAIS I had a definite policy
of breaking things gently to the biological community. Little bits
of information at a time. Leading people on so they would become
interested. In the back of my mind I had also planed to do the same
for gopher and www... take it easily one step at a time, but it seems
that there is such a deluge of stuff coming down the grapevine that
it is obvious something grand is going on in networking.
So rather than have all the info that comes my way slip over the
blue event horizon, I will post the most interesting stuff to
bionet.software where it will be stored in the WAIS BIOSCI.SRC
for future reference. With WWW you can put in hooks into NEWS, ARCHIE,
gopher and WAIS. Wipe that saliva from your chin!!!
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% CLIP & RECOMMENDATION %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
A new release of the World-Wide Web (W3) hypertext browser is now
available by anonymous FTP from host info.cern.ch. The source is in
/pub/www/src/WWWLineMode_1.2.tar.Z and some binaries exist
as/pub/www/bin/*
The "www" browser is an interactive hypertext client which has now
been extended to access and browse through
- Hypertext (HTML) or plain text files
- W3 search/retrieve servers
- Internet news groups
- Anonymous FTP sites
- "Gopher" campus-wide information systems
- WAIS index servers (though a gateway)
as a seamless "web" of information.
www (on unix or vms) can also follow links directly to telnet (and
rlogin) sites. This allows hypertexts and indexes to point to online
communications facilities which don't have servers.
www runs on virtually any machine, including all sun3, sun4, NeXT,
apollo, hp700 ("snake"), decstation, vax/ultrix, vax/vms, ibm-pc,
rs6000, IBM VM/CMS.
www is extensible 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.
www can be easily used to set up a telnet information service, as we
have done (telnet info.cern.ch for details of any of this).
In interactive mode, www lets you scroll up and down, jump through
links, make searches of indexes. You can list links, and return to
documents you have previously visited. You can save a document to a
file or pipe, or print it (under unix).
As a generic information retrieval engine, W3 can be the basis for
all kinds of information-searching and analysis systems. You can run
www non-interactively from a shell script, and you can use it as a
filter from hypertext into plain text.
Those who have built other hypertext browsers (such as Hyperbole and
Viola) on top of the www browser will immediately gain access to all
this newly accessible online information.
Documentation on the protocols and formats used (including HTML, the
simple SGML-style hypertext format) and the format for addressing
documents on the net, is entirely readable on the web.
Also available through ftp is a simple skeleton server which you can
use to put up your own hypertext information system from existing
data, and a WWW-WAIS gateway which you can run on a unix platform to
save using our gateway at info.cern.ch. A hypertext editor for the
NeXT directly generates hypertext files. It is still available in its
prototype form with only part of the above facilities, but a neat GUI.
[new release "soon" :-}]
W3 takes wide-area networking and information retrieval and makes it
all available as hypertext. It was developed in order to provide
world-wide information services for high-energy physics but is growing
much beyond that. For more details, telnet info.cern.ch (all the help
and documentation is in the web) or mail us.
As for the (hopefully near) future, we're working on the Mac browser
and Pei Wei (ucb) is coming up with an even smarter "Viola" X
interface - not to mention the "otherwise" team in Helsinki who are
also making an X-based W3 browser. We've been concentrating on the
common networking code, completely revamping the client internal
architecure. Next along the line is format negotiation as planned
ages ago, and authorization procedures requested by some information
providers. And we will honestly get round to making that w3 archie
server with links straight into the archives! Thanks to all the people
putting up data, sending us suggestions, bug fixes, neat server code
bits etc. We won't flood the news with frequent messages about W3 - so
if you want announcements you can join one of our mailing lists:
www-interest for announcements, and/or www-talk for technical
discussion (how to join is in the web, or just mail us).
That's all for now... Have fun browsing, and put up your favorite
hypertext on the net!
__________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee, timbl at info.cern.ch
Jean-Francois Groff jfg at info.cern.ch
World Wide Web initiative (NeXTMail is ok)
CERN Tel: +41(22)767 3755
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland Fax: +41(22)767 7155
