Agora (web browser)
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Agora was a
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 se ...
email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
browser and was a
proof of concept Proof of concept (POC or PoC), also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has prac ...
to help people to use the full internet. Agora was an email-based web browser designed for non-graphic terminals and to help people without full access to the internet such as in developing countries or without a permanent internet connection. Similar to W3Gate, Agora was a server application designed to fetch HTML documents through e-mail rather than http.


Functionality

Agora was not a
client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuabl ...
application. To access the Internet you had to install the Agora browser on a
server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...
and send Agora an email with the requested URL. The Agora application would send an email back with the requested content of the link. The email which was sent by the server, contained the
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...
so that a normal web browser was able to display the page as it should be or in a ''
lynx A lynx is a type of wild cat. Lynx may also refer to: Astronomy * Lynx (constellation) * Lynx (Chinese astronomy) * Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded mission concept for a next-generation X-ray space observatory Places Canada * Lynx, Ontar ...
-style''. Different options made browsing easier. The servers could be configured differently so that some servers sent emails back containing only
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 Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
, because the content was deeper on the page. Agora was praised for handling frames correctly, although other similar applications were able to handle this by serving the source code and rerequest the used frame.


Features

Although Agora was based on email communication it was able to search by different
search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
: Archie,
MetaCrawler MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg. It was originally a metasearch engine, as its name suggests. Throughout its lifetime it combined web search results from sources including G ...
,
Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...
,
Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
, WAIS Search in Oxford Univ,
Hyper RFC Hyper may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Hyper'' (2016 film), 2016 Indian Telugu film * ''Hyper'' (2018 film), 2018 Indian Kannada film * ''Hyper'' (magazine), an Australian video game magazine *Hyper (TV channel), a Filipino sports channe ...
,
WebCrawler WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search. History Brian Pinkerto ...
, Veronica Search,
AltaVista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...
and
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
. Agora limits the number of requests processed in each message to 10 to prevent the service from being attacked by messages containing excessive commands that could cause a
DDOS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connec ...
attack.


Supported protocols

The Agora server is based on the Line Mode Browser and on the
libwww Libwww was an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, released libwww (then also called the "Common Library") in late 1992, comprising ...
and thus it supported different kinds of
internet protocols The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
besides the classical
http The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
and
gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They are ...
browsing, namely
NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univers ...
, Archie,
Finger A finger is a limb of the body and a type of digit, an organ of manipulation and sensation found in the hands of most of the Tetrapods, so also with humans and other primates. Most land vertebrates have five fingers ( Pentadactyly). Chambers ...
, WAIS. Although Agora was able to handle many protocols, the interactive
telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...
protocol was an exception.


Version history

From Agora 0.7d it was possible to search some searchable sites by adding the search terms separated by spaces after the URL, but this would not work with forms. Since Agora version 0.8e it was possible to split the requested URLs into two or more lines.
Data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...
with uuencoded by
gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and in ...
or zip was also integrated. Agora version 0.8f determined frames and linked pictures goto and the answer mail get help in these cases.


Limitations

One limitation of Agora was that it had an integrated limit for the output mail of about 10,000 lines (originally 5,000) primarily to protect users and the network from excessive bandwidth/resource usage. With this limitation, uuencoded files would not exceed 1
megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...
because some
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
s and
email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
s had problems with files larger than 1MB. Uuencoded files used too much bandwidth and so data compression was integrated. Since most websites contained links to inline images or binary files such as archives/executables Agora had to uuencode these files prior to sending them. Usenet support was read only because the server was anonymous.


Further development

In version 0.9 users were able to fill in forms.
README In software development, a README file contains information about the other files in a directory or archive of computer software. A form of documentation, it is usually a simple plain text file called README, Read Me, READ.ME, README.TXT, R ...
file in the packed source code and in the packed executable of Agora 0.8.
This version was never developed. The
World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
(W3C) servers were shut down because of the heavy load. Secret created the software to set up as a local strategy, but that did not work at that time. The consequences were that the W3C servers got too many requests and they had to shut down their Agora implementation.


System requirements

To run Agora on a server, the server had to have Perl installed. The
libwww Libwww was an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, released libwww (then also called the "Common Library") in late 1992, comprising ...
binaries A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document fil ...
''www_*.*.Z'' had to be in the same directory.


Criticism

Agora ignored completely the different kinds of applets which were popular at that time:
Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company **TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...
, Tk,
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
and
Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...
. Agora could not handle
HTML table An HTML element is a type of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) document component, one of several types of HTML nodes (there are also text nodes, comment nodes and others). The first used version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 ...
s properly. The Usenet support was incomplete and created problems in translating the answer in formatted text; also, some newsgroups caused a crash. It could not handle Chinese, Japanese, Korean web pages.


References


External links


Agora .8 source
W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Agora (Web Browser) 1994 software Discontinued web browsers Free software programmed in Perl Gopher clients Usenet clients World Wide Web Consortium