Argo was part of a project to make the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 accessible to scholars in the Humanities at the University of Groningen

University of Groningen

The University of Groningen , located in the city of Groningen, was founded in 1614. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands as well as one of its largest. Since its inception more than 100,000 students have graduated...

. The Argo web 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...

 was created in August 1994 by Bert Bos

Bert Bos

Gijsbert Bos is a computer scientist. He studied mathematics at the University of Groningen, and wrote his PhD thesis on Rapid user interface development with the script language Gist....

.

There currently is no publicly available compiled version, although the source code still exists.

History

The Argo browser was able to handle its own style sheet language called Stream-based Style Sheet Proposal (SSP) rendered

Rendering (computer graphics)

Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...

 mostly by Xlib

Xlib

Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the protocol...

/Xrm. SSP was general enough to be able to applied to other markup language

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

s in addition to HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

. In the development process of Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

 (CSS) Bos was one of the first people who decided to join Håkon Wium Lie

Håkon Wium Lie

Håkon Wium Lie is a web pioneer, a standards activist, and, , the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software.He is best known for proposing the concept of Cascading Style Sheets while working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994. As an employee at W3C, he developed CSS into a...

. Although this early adoption SSP had other advanced features that could not be integrated in CSS1 and had to wait for CSS2. Arena

Arena (web browser)

The Arena browser was an early testbed web browser and web authoring tool for Unix. Originally authored by Dave Raggett in 1993, the browser continued its development at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing...

 and Argo were presented as a testbed

Testbed

A testbed is a platform for experimentation of large development projects. Testbeds allow for rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and new technologies.The term is used across many disciplines to describe a development environment that is...

 at the World Wide Web Conference 3 on 10–14 April 1995 in Darmstadt

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

Functionality

Argo based on the W3A, an API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 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
  Cache
  In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...
  
  /proxy
  Proxy server
  In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...
  
   support
• Data formats
  File format
  A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...
  
   (e.g. ASCII
  ASCII
  The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
  
  , GIF
  GIF
  The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....
  
  , HTML
  HTML
  HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
  
  , JPEG
  JPEG
  In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
  
  , XBM
  XBM
  In computer graphics, the X Window System uses X BitMap , a plain text binary image format, for storing cursor and icon bitmaps used in the X GUI.XBM files differ markedly from most image files in that they take the form of C source files...
  
  , XPM)
• E-mail client
  E-mail client
  An email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email.The term can refer to any system capable of accessing the user's email mailbox, regardless of it being a mail user agent, a relaying server, or a human typing on a terminal...
  
  s (e.g. Mutt
  Mutt (e-mail client)
  Mutt is a text-based email client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version....
  
  , Pine
  Pine (e-mail client)
  Pine is a freeware, text-based email client developed at the University of Washington. The first version of this client was written in 1989. Source code was available for only the Unix version under a license written by the University of Washington...
  
  )
• Protocols
  Communications protocol
  A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...
  
  : FTP
  File Transfer Protocol
  File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...
  
  , gopher, 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....
  
  , 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...
  
  , 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...
  
  , local files
  File URI scheme
  The file URI scheme is a URI scheme specified in RFC 1630 and RFC 1738, typically used to retrieve files from within one's own computer.- Format :A file URL takes the form of file://host/path...
  
  
• Graphical navigation

The browser's kernel depended on the modules to provide such functionality.

Technical

The browser was run on HP-UX

HP-UX

HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...

and used dynamic loading to support its applets(plugins).

External links

• The Argo source code