ViolaWWW is a discontinued
browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
(WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
and acted as the recommended browser at
CERN,
where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to
Mosaic
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...
.
Viola
Released in 1992,
Viola was the invention of
Pei-Yuan Wei, a member of the
eXperimental Computing Facility
Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility and the Co ...
(XCF) at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
.
Viola was a
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
-based programming/scripting language; the
acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
stood for "Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application".
Pei's interest in graphically based software began with
HyperCard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...
, 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 terminal
In computing, an X terminal is a display/input terminal for X Window System client applications. X terminals enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1990s when they offered a lower total cost of ownership alternative to a full Unix workstat ...
s, 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 ..."
Pei released Viola 0.8 in 1991.
History of ViolaWWW
After graduating, Pei developed Viola further while working with the XCF and startups.
Later, he would be funded by
O'Reilly Books
O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of a ...
, the technical publisher, which used the software to help demonstrate its
Global Network Navigator site. 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.
Ed Krol
Ed Krol (born August 21, 1951) is the former network manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the former assistant director of Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) at the University of Illinois ...
also highlighted the browser in his popular 1992 text, ''
Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog
''The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog'', by Ed Krol, was published in September 1992 by O'Reilly. The ''Los Angeles Times'' notes that the ''Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog'' was the "first popular book about the medium" and " ...
''.
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
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...
and could be used to build complex hypermedia applications with features like applets and other interactive content as early as 1992.
Firsts
Viola was the first web browser to have the following features:
* 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. This was implemented in Viola well before
CSS was developed in 1998:
* a sidebar panel used for displaying "meta" information, intra document navigational links, and other information, similar to (but not as sophisticated as) features found in several modern browsers.
* a
scripting language
A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled.
A scripting ...
that can be accessed from an HTML document, such that an HTML document can embed highly interactive scripts/applets. This can be seen as the precursor to
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
and
embedded objects.
* Forms
Competing against Mosaic
While ViolaWWW opened the door to the World Wide Web,
its limitations, including it only being implemented on the X Window System, meant it could not compete with
Mosaic
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...
, the browser which brought the Web into the mainstream. Among other things, Mosaic was easier to install on the computers most people were using.
Originally developed for
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
, it was soon ported to
Microsoft Windows, a platform on which ViolaWWW never ran.
ViolaWWW in patent lawsuits
In 1999,
Eolas Technologies and the
University of California
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...
filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Microsoft, claiming infringement of U.S. patent 5,838,906, (covering browser plugins) by the
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...
web browser. Eolas won the initial case in August 2003 and was awarded damages of $ from Microsoft. The District Court reaffirmed the jury's decision in January 2004.
In March 2005, an appeals court directed that there be a retrial, overturning a decision that Microsoft pay $521 million in damages. The appeals court said that the initial ruling had ignored two key arguments put forward by Microsoft. Microsoft had wanted to show the court that ViolaWWW was
prior art
Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria ...
, since it was created in 1993 at the University of California, a year before the key patent were filed. Microsoft had also suggested that
Michael David Doyle, Eolas' founder and a former University of California researcher, had intentionally concealed his knowledge of ViolaWWW when filing the patent claim. Microsoft subsequently settled with Eolas, in August 2007, without a retrial. Eolas continued to file suits against dozens of other technology companies.
In February 2012 a Texas jury found that two of Eolas' patents were invalid after testimony from several defendants including Tim Berners-Lee and Pei-Yuan Wei, credited as creator of the Viola browser. The testimony professed that the Viola browser included Eolas' claimed inventions before the filing date (September 7, 1993). There is "substantial evidence that Viola was publicly known and used" before the plaintiffs' alleged conception date, it added. The ruling effectively ended a pending lawsuit against 22 companies including Yahoo, Google, and many online retailers.
See also
*
History of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or, simply, "the Web") is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service tha ...
*
History of the web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It further provides for the capture or input of information which may be returned to the presenting system, then store ...
References
External links
*
*
*
Download Viola
{{Early web browsers
POSIX web browsers
1991 software
1992 software
Discontinued web browsers