Development began in June 1993 - Internal testing Only
Native support for accessing documents and data using World Wide Web,
gopher, Anonymous FTP, and NNTP (Usenet News) protocols. Support for
archie, finger, whois, and Veronica (as well as others) through gateways.
Full HTML display
Support for inlined GIF images in HTML hypertext documents
Internal sound support for Sun/NeXT/DEC .AU audio files
Support for GIF, JPEG, MPEG, QuickTime for Windows, Microsoft Video for
Windows, Postcript and other documents via forking to appropriate
viewers (user configurable)
Full hypertext support, including using inlined images as anchors
Optional toolbar with shortcut buttons
Optional status bar to display hyperlink destinations
Local History
Fully customizable font selection
Savable preferences, including window size and position
Minimal Hotlist
Scrolling for large documents
Status of loading/decoding shown in status bar
Version 0.2a
Fixed some memory leaks
Now works with Winsock 1.1 compliant DLLs
Local file support
User configurable hotlist
Ability to add current document to hotlist
Version 0.3a
Fixed bug which would cause a GPF upon exiting
Fixed a number of memory holes which would lead to GPF's and quickly
running out of available resources. (although some probably still
remain).
Binary Transfer Mode.
Support for Inlined X-Bitmaps
Configuration option to automatically load a home page.
User configurable menus
Internal support for AIFF audio files
Fixed bug which would cause a crash if an inlined image was missing
Fixed strange bug which resulted 'y with quotation mark' characters
Added ability to perform remote search (still has a bug...see below)
Version 0.4a
Null chunk bug has been fixed! You should no longer see Mosaic dropping
parts of a document.
Problems with anchors on left edge of the window have been fixed.
GPF when choosing "Add Current to Hotlist" with no document loaded has been
fixed.
Anchors in preformatted text now work correctly.
The new line break tag (<BR>) has been implemented.
Description lists display correctly.
Lists can now be nested to arbitrary depth.
The bold (<B>) and italics (<I>) tags now work.
We now try to load an image several times before we give up on it. This
is actually a little annoying on documents that have missing images (such
as some of the Vatican Exhibit docs), but I'm working on fixing that.
Mosaic for Windows calls WSACleanup to clean up the sockets library. This
may temporarily cause a problem for people using our library - Windows
will give the message "Application Error - Call to Undefined Dynalink" when
you try to exit. Don't worry about it. We'll get around to fixing it.
Lastly, the fix to the bug that was wiping out chunks of a document seems
to have improved the GPF'ing. However, it still crashes every once in
a while, and it still seems to be a much more frequent occurence in the
non-debugging version of the program. *sigh*.
Version 0.5a
Released Sept. 16, 1993
Image cacheing within document - no more multiple loads of images
when they are used multiple times in a document.
MUCH faster scrolling, due to smarter drawing function. This
introduced an as-yet-unfixed redrawing bug while scrolling in a document
that has inlined images.
This seems to alleviated the problem with documents being visually
mangled when loaded while not scrolled to the top.
Bug with removing spaces in Gopher, News, and FTP is fixed.
Internal anchors - i.e., hyperlinks to anchors within a document - work now, complete with
scrolling to the correct location.
File Typing (i.e. HTML vs plaintext) is done more intelligently.
Home Page button and Menu option work now, loading whatever document is
set up as "URL0" in WMOSAIC.INI.
Open Local capability - use standard file dialog to open files on local
disk.
Drag and Drop local file capability
Drag and Drop file to annotation window
Image retry is smarter - knows when it failed to connect vs when server
returned an error.
Find/Find Next (searching within a document)
The white strip that was showing up in the Fast and Error bitmaps when
they were hyperlinks is gone.
Spaces are now stripped out at the beginning of list indices and
paragraphs.
Try out the brand-new "Mail to Developers" option under the Help menu!!
This lets you send email to the developers straight from your PC.
Be sure to set up your email address in WMOSAIC.INI.
The ISMAP image attribute is supported!! For a demo of this, take a
look at the
Expo.
History Window is now fixed - "Back" and "Forward" work correctly.
"Display Inlined Images" option is now complete - shut this off to
not transfer inlined images (lots faster for people running over a
slow net connection). Press the left mouse button to traverse a
hyperlink, press the right mouse button to load an unloaded inline
image.
The new horizontal rule tag (<HR>) has been implemented.
The messed-up MPEG and JPEG extensions are fixed, and configureable.
Options for changing anchor color and underlining anchors.
Completely configureable MIME-style extension typing and presentation
(See installation documentation for details.)
Drive specifiers have been added to local file URLs.
"DELETE : command not found" error after loading GIF, etc., is gone.
Personal Annotations are much more robust now.
Scrolling via keys is now supported.
ISO characters should work now, if specified by the correct HTML, like so:
"Sein -- das ist der Paß für die Ewigkeit." (aus Die
Grössere Hoffnung von Ilse Aichinger.)
The scrolling bug is fixed. You shouldn't see the screen mess up due
to images or large text in the document anymore.
Network I/O is now (somewhat) interruptable. Click on the big
Mosaic icon in the upper-right corner to kill a net transfer.
Also, quitting Mosaic forces a kill of any net transfers in progress.
This means the "Can't run two instances of the same program" error message
shouldn't appear anymore (although this feature is still a bit buggy.)
Images can now be alligned middle, top, or bottom, instead of just top.
Considering that the default is bottom, and we only did top before, I
was pretty surprised that no-one mentioned this anomaly throughout all
our beta testing.
News articles are now readable (i.e., not all on one line.)
URL redirection (a feature of HTTP 1.0) is now supported.
Home Page loading is fixed.
If you were having problems with the first document you tried never
loading, but subsequent ones working fine, that's fixed.
Title and URL boxes are redrawn at the correct time now.
Back & Forward Assertion Failed errors are gone.
Telnet executable (used for telnet:// URLs) is now configureable - see
"telnet=" under the Viewers section of the INI file.
FTP error messages are now returned to the user.
FTP logins now use your email address when logging in (this fixes a
connect problem the CERN LibWWW was creating.
You can log in to a NON-anonymous FTP via the following method: set the
URL to be FILE://username@machine/pathname. For example, to log in
as user "jdoe" to FTP site "ftp.yoyodyne.com", in the "/usr/jdoe"
directory, give the URL:
"file://jdoe@ftp.yoyodyne.com/usr/jdoe"
Mosaic will pop up a dialog box, asking to confirm the username and
give your password. Your password is maintained within Mosaic
until you quit. Do NOT use this feature if you are
security-paranoid.
Gopher and FTP now use pretty icons for files/directories/etc, and FTP
shows the file sizes.
New set of Configured Menus, with all kinds of pointers.
HTML+ Forms are now supported! This is not quite finished, but
definitely well into the useful stage.
- Nasty problem with local file support fixed.
There is now an environment variable for the location of the
MOSAIC.INI file. To use this, put a line like the following in your AUTOEXEC.BAT:
SET MOSAIC.INI=C:\MISC\MY_MOS.INI
XBMs are now written as 1 bit bitmaps. This means Mosaic
now works in 24-bit and 16-bit video modes.
Better error reporting (explanatory text instead of numbers.)
Cursor now behaves itself - hourglass cursor only appears
during transfers when cursor is in window, and doesn't flash.
Horizontal rules no longer disappear.
URL/Title text overwriting boxes now fixed.
FTP is now much more stable.
Anchors in "pre" formatted text bug fixed.
Mosaic now supports a command-line parameter for URLs and
local files (it discriminates between a pathname like
C:\TMP\TEST.HTML and a URL like file:///C|/TMP/TEST.HTML.)
Inlined images are now cached across documents - if an image is
in a previous document, it won't be reloaded from the net.
Blank lines in "pre" formatted text now appear correctly.
Occasional blank white (! Not grey!) chunks fixed.
printing (still has problems with bold, long documents, and images)
Viewing and Saving of document source ( File, Document Source...)
Access authentication
GPF on forms reloading fixed
Case insensitive find implemented (option in the find box)
GPF with Find Dialog fixed
Vertical scrollbars no longer disappear in large files
horizontal scrollbars now appear for documents wider than the screen
(Still have problems with the history window)
Improved internal audio support - allows playing of .au files on 8-bit cards. To use the internal audio support, remove the .au extension from the audio/basic definition in the [Suffixes] section of your mosaic.ini file.
Bug with deeply nested tags fixed
"-i inifile" command-line option for INI file location.
ie. mosaic -i c:/directory/mosaic.ini.
< OPTION> tags won't crash Mosaic anymore
fixed bug with downloading files via FTP
FTP slightly improved - now able to connect to ftp.microsoft.com, e.g.
< em > and < strong > tags now supported
< dir > and < menu > tags are now more properly supported
Grey out back & forward when no current doc
Screen repaint from another window on top is occasionally wrong
Screen repaints get "lost" if busy fixed for 3.1 but still a problem with NT
When search window disappears, focus switches to main window.
"Add Current to Hotlist" when current hl is QUICKLIST now works (unlimited size)
"Add Current to Hotlist" works for URL's without titles (gohper servers)
Open URL Dialog now fits on a 640 x 480 screen
entity (&) termination
Focus switches to Search window when it appears
better filename mungeing (Unix files will now be properly converted to reflect the last extension. ie. here.it.is.txt will become here.txt)
There were two large memory leaks which occurred whenever an
inline image was decoded and displayed. These leaks were approx.
1,000 bytes each.
The document view window was being drawn incorrectly whenever the user
was at the bottom of a document, and Mosaic was re-sized.
XBM images are now properly read and do not result in an ERROR graphic.
XBM images used to require a LARGE amount of time to decode. The
code was re-written and now .xbm's decode approximately 100 times faster.
The Printing bugs; large files, images, bold text, .txt files.
Some minor problems with dialog boxes were fixed.
The CRASH caused by incorrect HTML, < dt > and < dd > tags without the < dl > tag,
was corrected. Mosaic is a little more forgiving, but not much. ;^)
The navigate back should now take you back to the last document viewed.
Previously, Mosaic did not update the history when users accessed
documents that were cached.
Enhancements
It is now possible to enter a URL directly to the Document URL line.
Select the Document URL line, enter the URL and press return to open the
desired URL.
The Vertical Scroll Bar is currently a permanent fixture on the
document view window. This eliminates an extra screen redraw which would
occur whenever the user went from a short document (less than one screenful)
to a long document or vice versa. Ideally we'd like the vertical scroll bar
to be dynamic without the extra redraws, but this will improve things for now.
The buttons on the button bar are now in color.
The "FIND" button was redrawn with a more intuitive picture. It used to
look like a thermometer and may have lead people to believe it was for
the hotlist.
This latest release has focused on speed and memory issues. Our next release, alpha 7,
will address many of the bugs which you have reported to us. The following bugs have
been fixed in alpha 6:
The loading of local URLs should no longer produce DNS Lookup failures.
The loading of local images and sound files no longer deletes the file.
The loading of images now shows the transfer progress.
file:// = ftp:// (Alpha 6 locked file:// for local files and ftp:// for remote files. However,
due to the large number of existing files that were written using the old definition of
file://, we had to revert back to file:// = ftp://. Thus, file:///c| MUST be used to access
local files.)
The -i option was fixed. (-i allows the user to use the mosaic.ini that is explicitly
defined. ie. mosaic.exe -i c:\ncsa\mosaic.ini)
Added Features
The save, save as function. Save and Save as will save the current document to your local disk.
Animated Icon Change. We've changed the size of the icon to be relative to the amount of
space that is available in the window. ie. If you use both the tool bar and the Show Current URL
functions, you will have a full-size animated icon. If you choose not to use either of these
functions, the icon will be reduced in size to fit in the available space.
Tool tips were added. Tool tips offers the user information about the current tool the mouse
cursor is pointing at in the Tool bar.
The find icon on the Tool bar has changed from the list icon to a binocular icon.
We've removed the "URL" title from the "Show Current URL"
Mosaic is more lenient about the syntax of the menu item definitions in the
"mosaic.ini" file. Bad syntax caused
crashes on startup in Version 2Alpha8. :(
Mosaic will no longer crash if you try to print a document with inline images
when the "Display Inline Image" option
is turned off.
Mosaic won't choke on the Comment Tag, "<!-- Your comment -->
Title Tags, <TITLE> </TITLE> will recognize entities
Mosaic won't choke on CRs and LF between the quotes in the Image Tags,
<IMG SRC="..."> and Anchor Tags,
<A HREF=" ... ">.