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49-687: In 1994, a team of Java developers started writing WebRunner, which was a clone of the internet browser Mosaic . It was based on the Java programming language. The name ‘WebRunner’ was a tribute to the Blade Runner movie. WebRunner's first public demonstration was given by John Gage and James Gosling at the Technology Entertainment Design Conference in Monterey, California in 1995. Renamed HotJava, it

98-520: A tree view or grid view . A grid view, however, can be mimicked by using a standard HTML table with each cell containing a text input element. A tree view could also be mimicked through nested tables or, more semantically appropriately, nested lists . In both cases, a server-side process is responsible for processing the information, while JavaScript handles the user-interaction. Implementations of these interface elements are available through JavaScript libraries such as jQuery . HTML 4 introduced

147-406: A web page allows a user to enter data that is sent to a server for processing. Forms can resemble paper or database forms because web users fill out the forms using checkboxes , radio buttons , or text fields . For example, forms can be used to enter shipping or credit card data to order a product, or can be used to retrieve search results from a search engine . Forms are enclosed in

196-462: A web server than using CGI (such as FastCGI , Plack or Apache 's mod_perl ). Perl CGIs were once a very common way to write web applications . However, many web hosts today effectively only support PHP, and developers of web applications often seek compatibility with them. A modern Perl 5 CGI using the CGI module with a form similar to the one above might look like: form_handler.pl Among

245-529: A What's New page, and about one new link was being added per day. This was a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions. Yet it was the availability of Mosaic and Mosaic-derived graphical browsers themselves that drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by August 1995 and millions by 1998. Metcalfe expressed

294-512: A separate browser began to decrease after the 1994 release of Netscape Navigator , the relevance of which was noted in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML : "Netscape Communications has designed an all-new WWW browser Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program." In 1994, SCO released Global Access, a modified version of SCO's Open Desktop Unix , which became

343-858: A tiny fraction of users left by 1997, when the project was discontinued. Microsoft licensed one of the derivative commercial products, Spyglass Mosaic, to create Internet Explorer in 1995. In December 1991, the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was passed, which provided funding for new projects at the NCSA, where after trying ViolaWWW , David Thompson demonstrated it to the NCSA software design group. This inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina – two programmers working at NCSA – to create Mosaic. Andreessen and Bina began developing Mosaic in December 1992 for Unix's X Window System , calling it xmosaic . Marc Andreessen announced

392-558: A user entered the JavaScript code < script > alert ( 1 )</ script > into the firstname field, the browser would execute the script on the form_handler.php page, just as if it had been coded by the developer; malicious code could be executed this way. filter_input () was introduced in PHP 5.2. Users of earlier PHP versions could use the htmlspecialchars () function, or regular expressions to sanitize

441-868: A version specifically targeting OpenVMS operating system, is one of the longest-lived efforts to maintain Mosaic. Using the VMS support already built-in in original version (Bjorn S. Nilsson ported Mosaic 1.2 to VMS in the summer of 1993), developers incorporated a substantial part of the HTML engine from mMosaic, another defunct flavor of the browser. As of the most recent version (4.2), released in 2007, VMS Mosaic supported HTML 4.0, OpenSSL , cookies , and various image formats including GIF , JPEG , PNG , BMP , TGA , TIFF and JPEG 2000 image formats. The browser works on VAX , Alpha , and Itanium platforms. Another long-lived version, Mosaic-CK , developed by Cameron Kaiser,

490-472: Is JavaScript . Using JavaScript on the Document Object Model (DOM) leads to the method of Dynamic HTML that allows dynamic creation and modification of a web page within the browser. While client-side languages used in conjunction with forms are limited, they often can serve to do pre- validation of the form data and/or to prepare the form data to send to a server-side program. This usage

539-403: Is scalability —server side processing for all users occurs on the server, while client side processing occurs on individual client computers. Some of the interpreted languages commonly used to design interactive forms in web development are PHP , Python , Ruby , Perl , JSP , Adobe ColdFusion and some of the compiled languages commonly used are Java and C# with ASP.NET . PHP

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588-687: Is also available and is common for POST-based file submissions. Forms are usually combined with programs written in various programming language to allow developers to create dynamic web sites . The most popular languages include both client-side and/or server-side languages. Although any programming language can be used on the server to process a form's data, the most commonly used languages are scripting languages , which tend to have stronger string handling functionality than programming languages such as C, and also have automatic memory management which helps to prevent buffer overrun attacks. The de facto client-side scripting language for web sites

637-437: Is being replaced, however, by HTML5 's new input field types and required attribute. Server-side code can do a vast assortment of tasks to create dynamic web sites that, for technical or security reasons, client-side code cannot — from authenticating a login , to retrieving and storing data in a database , to spell checking , to sending e-mail . A significant advantage to server-side over client-side execution

686-471: Is no longer widely used in new development due to lack of updates, security concerns, and difficulty of configuration. Some companies offer forms as a hosted service . Usually, these companies give some kind of visual editor, reporting tools and infrastructure to create and host the forms, that can be embedded into webpages. Web hosting companies provide templates to their clients as an add-on service. Other form hosting services offer free contact forms that

735-482: Is not the first web browser for Microsoft Windows; this is Thomas R. Bruce 's little-known Cello . The Unix version of Mosaic was already famous before the Microsoft Windows, Amiga, and Mac versions were released. Other than displaying images embedded in the text (rather than in a separate window), Mosaic's original feature set is similar to the browsers on which it was modeled, such as ViolaWWW. But Mosaic

784-477: Is one very common language used for server-side "programming" and is one of the few languages created specifically for web programming . To use PHP with an HTML form, the URL of the PHP script is specified in the action attribute of the form tag. The target PHP file then accesses the data passed by the form through PHP's $ _POST or $ _GET variables, depending on the value of the method attribute used in

833-418: Is the concentration of functionality onto the server rather than relying on different web browsers to implement various functions in consistent, standardized ways. In addition, processing forms on a server often results in increased security if server-side execution is designed not to trust the data supplied by the client and includes such techniques as HTML sanitization . One disadvantage to server side code

882-437: Is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface": When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto

931-411: The <label> tag, which is intended to represent a caption in a user interface, and can be associated with a specific form control by specifying the id attribute of the control in the label tag's for attribute. This allows labels to stay with their elements when a window is resized and to allow more desktop-like functionality (e.g. clicking a radio button or checkbox's label will activate

980-538: The HTML <form> element. This HTML element specifies the communication endpoint the data entered into the form should be submitted to, and the method of submitting the data, GET or POST . Forms can be made up of standard graphical user interface elements: The sample image on the right shows most of these elements: These basic elements provide the most common graphical user interface (GUI) elements, but not all. For example, there are no equivalents to

1029-597: The World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. Mosaic was the first browser to display images inline with text (instead of a separate window). Named for supporting multiple Internet protocols , including Hypertext Transfer Protocol , File Transfer Protocol , Network News Transfer Protocol , and Gopher , its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to Mosaic's initial popularity. Mistakenly described as

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1078-581: The About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Spyglass Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic. After NCSA stopped work on Mosaic, development of the NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System source code was continued by several independent groups. These independent development efforts include mMosaic (multicast Mosaic) which ceased development in early 2004, and Mosaic-CK and VMS Mosaic. VMS Mosaic ,

1127-494: The NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$ 2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer . After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $ 8 million. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML , specifically states, in a section called Coming Attractions , that Internet Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program". Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in

1176-450: The Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links – click, and the linked document appears – you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it

1225-460: The Web might be better than sex. In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape... Netscape Navigator was later developed by Netscape , which employed many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla Firefox . Spyglass, Inc. licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing its own web browser but never used any of

1274-467: The associated input element). HTML 5 introduces a number of input tags that can be represented by other interface elements. Some are based upon text input fields and are intended to input and validate specific common data. These include <email> to enter email addresses, <tel> for telephone numbers, <number> for numeric values. There are additional attributes to specify required fields, fields that should have keyboard focus when

1323-692: The creation of the first dynamic web pages . From 1994 to 1997, the National Science Foundation supported the further development of Mosaic. Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark , one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois , started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation , producing Netscape Navigator . Mosaic's popularity as

1372-624: The first browser that could submit forms to a server. Mosaic led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Other browsers existed during this period, such as Erwise , ViolaWWW , MidasWWW , and tkWWW , but did not have the same effect as Mosaic on public use of the Internet. In the October 1994 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolfe notes in the article titled "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy , AOL , and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete – and Mosaic

1421-441: The first commercial product to incorporate Mosaic. However, by 1998, the Mosaic user base had almost completely evaporated as users moved to other web browsers. The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free of charge for all versions (with certain limitations). Additionally, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code (source code for

1470-558: The first graphical web browser, it was preceded by WorldWideWeb , the lesser-known Erwise , and ViolaWWW . Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992, released in January 1993, with official development and support until January 1997. Mosaic lost market share to Netscape Navigator in late 1994, and had only

1519-446: The form. Here is a basic form handler PHP script that will display the contents of the first_name input field on the page: form.html form_handler.php The sample code above uses PHP's filter_input () function to sanitize the user's input before inserting it onto the page. Simply printing (echoing) user input to the browser without checking it first is something that should be avoided in secure forms processors: if

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1568-530: The names and values in the form elements are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using GET or POST . Historically, an email transport was also used. The default MIME type (internet media type) , application/x-www-form-urlencoded , is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with " + " instead of " %20 ". Another possible encoding, Internet media type multipart/form-data ,

1617-400: The other versions was available after agreements were signed). Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment. As of 1993 , license holders included these: Robert Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped: ... to rectify many of

1666-588: The pivotal role of Mosaic this way: In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher. In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that

1715-518: The project's first release, the "alpha/beta version 0.5," on January 23, 1993. Version 1.0 was released on April 21, 1993. Ports to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh were released in September. A port of Mosaic to the Amiga was available by October 1993. NCSA Mosaic for Unix (X Window System) version 2.0 was released on November 10, 1993 and was notable for adding support for forms , thus enabling

1764-476: The scene. Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise. Ultimately, web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s. Web browsers were the first to bring a graphical interface to search tools the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services. A mid-1994 guide lists Mosaic alongside

1813-441: The shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly, they ported

1862-438: The simplest and most commonly needed types of server-side script is that which simply emails the contents of a submitted form. This kind of script is frequently exploited by spammers , however, and many of the most popular form-to-email scripts in use are vulnerable to hijacking for the purpose of sending spam emails. One of the most popular scripts of this type was "FormMail.pl" made by Matt's Script Archive . Today, this script

1911-463: The software from so-called Unix computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the [Microsoft] Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers. Mosaic is based on the libwww library and thus supported a wide variety of Internet protocols included in the library: Archie , FTP , gopher , HTTP , NNTP , telnet , WAIS . Mosaic

1960-442: The traditional, text-oriented information search tools of the time, Archie and Veronica , Gopher , and WAIS but Mosaic quickly subsumed and displaced them all. Joseph Hardin, the director of the NCSA group within which Mosaic was developed, said downloads were up to 50,000 a month in mid-1994. In November 1992, there were twenty-six websites in the world and each one attracted attention. In its release year of 1993, Mosaic had

2009-400: The user can select a date or date range. And the color input type can be represented as an input text simply checking the value entered is a correct hexadecimal representation of a color, according to the specification, or a color picker widget (the latter being the solution used in most browsers which support this attribute). When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted,

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2058-467: The user input before doing anything with it. Perl is another language often used for web development . Perl scripts are traditionally used as Common Gateway Interface applications (CGIs). In fact, Perl is such a common way to write CGIs that the two are often confused. CGIs may be written in other languages than Perl (compatibility with multiple languages is a design goal of the CGI protocol) and there are other ways to make Perl scripts interoperate with

2107-407: The web page containing the form is loaded, and placeholder text that is displayed within the field but is not user input (such as the 'Search' text displayed in many search input fields before a search term is entered). These tasks used to be handled with JavaScript , but had become so common that support for them was added to the standard. The <date> input type displays a calendar from which

2156-416: The work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public. The adjective phenomenal, so often overused in this industry, is genuinely applicable to the... 'explosion' in the growth of the web after Mosaic appeared on

2205-545: Was considerably sluggish. This Web - software -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Mosaic browser Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: NCSA Mosaic was among the first widely available web browsers , instrumental in popularizing

2254-510: Was last released (version 2.7ck9) on July 11, 2010; a maintenance release with minor compatibility fixes (version 2.7ck10) was released on January 9, 2015, followed by another one (2.7ck11) in October 2015. The stated goal of the project is " Lynx with graphics" and runs on Mac OS X, Power MachTen , Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSs . The X, Windows, and Mac versions of Mosaic all had separate development teams and code bases. HTML form A webform , web form or HTML form on

2303-524: Was officially announced in May the same year at the SunWorld conference. The parser code was reused by the standard Java libraries. HotJava had somewhat limited functionality compared to other browsers of its time. More critically, HotJava suffered from the inherent performance limitations of Java virtual machine implementations of the day (both in terms of processing speed and memory consumption) and hence

2352-407: Was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net. Reid also refers to Matthew K. Gray's website, Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet , which indicates a dramatic leap in web use around the time of Mosaic's introduction. David Hudson concurs with Reid: Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, based on

2401-400: Was the first browser written and supported by a team of full-time programmers, was reliable and easy enough for novices to install, and the inline graphics proved immensely appealing. Mosaic is said to have made the Internet accessible to the ordinary person. Mosaic was the first browser to explore the concept of collaborative annotation in 1993 but never passed the test state. Mosaic was

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