Argo was part of a project to make the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

accessible to scholars in the Humanities at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; , abbreviated as RUG) is a Public university#Continental Europe, public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen (city), Groningen, Netherlands. Founded in 1614, th ...

. The Argo

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

was created in August 1994 by Bert Bos. There is presently no publicly available built version, although the source code is still available.

History

The Argo browser was able to handle its own style sheet language called Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP) rendered mostly by Xlib/ Xrm. SSP was general enough to be able to be applied to other

markup language A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...

s in addition to

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

. In the development process of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Bos was one of the first people who decided to join Håkon Wium Lie. Although this early adoption SSP had other advanced features that could not be integrated in CSS1 and had to wait for CSS2.

Arena An arena is a large enclosed venue, often circular or oval-shaped, designed to showcase theatre, Music, musical performances or Sport, sporting events. It comprises a large open space surrounded on most or all sides by tiered seating for specta ...

and Argo were presented as a testbed at the World Wide Web Conference 3 on 10–14 April 1995 in

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it the ...

Functionality

Argo based on the W3A, an

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

for ''WWW browser applets''. The browser featured plug-in modules, or " applets", which allowed for the addition of new functionality without recompilation. Examples of such functionality provided by the applets includes adding support for the following: * Bookmarks/history * Cache/ proxy support * Data formats (e.g.

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, XBM, XPM) *

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 (e.g. Mutt,

Pine A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. ''World Flora Online'' accepts 134 species-rank taxa (119 species and 15 nothospecies) of pines as cu ...

) * Protocols:

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

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 ar ...

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 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, wher ...

, NNTP, WAIS, local files * Graphical navigation The browser's kernel depended on the modules to provide such functionality.

Technical

The browser was run on

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

and used dynamic loading to support its applets.

References

External links

The Argo source code
{{DEFAULTSORT:Argo (Web Browser) 1994 software Discontinued web browsers Gopher clients Usenet clients

History

Functionality

Technical

See also

References

External links