Agora (web browser)
Encyclopedia
Agora was a World Wide Web
email
browser
and was a proof of concept
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.
application. To access the Internet you had to install the Agora browser on a server
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
source code
so that a normal web browser was able to display the page as it should be or in a lynx
-style. Different options made browsing easier.
The servers could be configured differently so that some servers sent emails back containing only JavaScript
, 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.
: Archie
, MetaCrawler
, Lycos
, Yahoo!
, WAIS
Search in Oxford Univ, Hyper RFC, WebCrawler
, Veronica Search
, AltaVista
and Google
.
Agora limits the number of requests processed in each message to 10 to prevent the service from being attacked by with messages containing excessive commands that could cause a DDOS attack.
and thus it supported different kinds of internet protocols besides the classical http
and gopher browsing, namely NNTP
, Archie, Finger
, WAIS.
Although Agora was able to handle many protocols, the interactive telnet
protocol was an exception.
Since Agora version 0.8e it was possible to split the requested URLs into two or more lines. Data compression
with uuencoded by gzip
or zip
was also integrated.
Agora version 0.8f determined frames and linked pictures goto and the answer mail get help in these cases.
because some operating system
s and email clients 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.
The World Wide Web Consortium
(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.
binaries
www_*.*.Z had to be in the same directory.
, Tk
, Java
and Python
.
Agora could not handle HTML tables 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.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
and was a proof of concept
Proof of concept
A proof of concept or a proof of principle is a realization of a certain method or idea to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory that has the potential of being used...
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 clientClient (computing)
A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....
application. To access the Internet you had to install the Agora browser on a server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
and send Agora an email with the requested URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
. 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
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
so that a normal web browser was able to display the page as it should be or in a lynx
Lynx (web browser)
Lynx is a text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals and is very configurable.-Usage:Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support...
-style. Different options made browsing easier.
The servers could be configured differently so that some servers sent emails back containing only JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
, because the content was deeper on the page. Agora was praised for handling frames
Framing (World Wide Web)
When using web browsers, the terms frames or frameset refer to the display of two or more web pages or media elements displayed side-by-side within the same browser window...
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 enginesWeb search engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
: Archie
Archie search engine
Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J...
, MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler is a metasearch engine that blends the top web search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing , Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and other popular search engines. MetaCrawler also provides users the option to search for images, video, news, yellow pages and white pages...
, Lycos
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...
, Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, WAIS
Wide area information server
Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client–server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" to search index databases on remote computers...
Search in Oxford Univ, Hyper RFC, WebCrawler
WebCrawler
WebCrawler is a metasearch engine that blends the top search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing Search , Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and other popular search engines. WebCrawler also provides users the option to search for images, audio, video, news, yellow pages and white pages...
, Veronica Search
Veronica (computer)
Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers...
, AltaVista
AltaVista
AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google...
and Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
.
Agora limits the number of requests processed in each message to 10 to prevent the service from being attacked by with messages containing excessive commands that could cause a DDOS attack.
Supported protocols
The Agora server is based on the Line Mode Browser and on the libwwwLibwww
libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....
and thus it supported different kinds of internet protocols besides the classical http
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web....
and gopher browsing, namely NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol
The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications...
, Archie, Finger
Finger protocol
In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.-Name/Finger protocol:...
, WAIS.
Although Agora was able to handle many protocols, the interactive telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...
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
Data compression
In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....
with uuencoded by gzip
Gzip
Gzip is any of several software applications used for file compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU Project's implementation, "gzip" standing for GNU zip. It is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding...
or zip
Info-ZIP
Info-ZIP is a set of open-source software to handle ZIP archives. It has been in circulation since 1989. It consists of 4 separately-installable packages: the Zip and UnZip command-line utilities; and WiZ and MacZip, which are graphical user interfaces for archiving programs in Microsoft Windows...
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 10000 lines (originally 5000) primarily to protect users and the network from excessive bandwidth/resource usage. With this limitation, uuencoded files would not exceed 1 megabyteMegabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
because some operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s and email clients 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. This version was never developed.The World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
(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 libwwwLibwww
libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....
binaries
Binary file
A binary file is a computer file which may contain any type of data, encoded in binary form for computer storage and processing purposes; for example, computer document files containing formatted text...
www_*.*.Z had to be in the same directory.
Criticism
Agora ignored completely the different kinds of applets which were popular at that time: TclTcl
Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...
, Tk
Tk (framework)
Tk is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface in many different programming languages....
, Java
Java applet
A Java applet is an applet delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine , or in Sun's AppletViewer, a stand-alone tool for testing applets...
and Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
.
Agora could not handle HTML tables 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.
External links
- Agora .8 source, W3C