Web site: viola.org (not active)
Category: Network
Subcategory: Web browsers
Platform: Unix
License: unknown
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: ViolaWWW
First release: March 9, 1992
ViolaWWW – a web browser for Unix. It was developed in the early 1990s and was one of the first known web browsers for accessing the World Wide Web. ViolaWWW was favored by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) during this time.
Viola was originally the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, a student at the Experimental Computing Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in graphical software began with HyperCard, one of the first commercially available hypertext systems, which he first encountered in 1989. Using only an X terminal connection and a HyperCard manual, Pei-Yuan Wei created the first version of Viola by taking existing concepts and implementing them for the X Window System.
Viola featured a toolkit, a tool for developing and supporting visual interactive media applications, based on a multimedia web browser application. Viola ran under the X Window System and could be used to enhance complex hypermedia applications built with HTML 3.0 (the latest version of HTML at the time) with features such as applets and other interactive content.[4]
Viola was ahead of its time, as it already included the following features:
– Client-side document embedding, a precursor to frames, or syndication via JavaScript, which is still widely used today.
– A simple stylesheet mechanism for inserting information such as fonts, colors, and alignments into a document. Even before Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was developed in 1998, Viola had already implemented these features very well:
– A sidebar panel for displaying meta information, navigation links, and other information, similar to the features in today’s modern browsers.
– A scripting language that made it possible to embed interactive scripts and applets in an HTML document. This scripting language can be seen as a precursor to today’s JavaScript.
