ViolaWWW

Released in 1992, Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, a member of the Experimental Computing Facility (XCF) at the University of California, Berkeley.{{cite web|title=ViolaWWW Hypertext Browser|url=http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Viola/violaWWWAbout.html|access-date=28 July 2010|author=Pei-Yuan Wei|author-link=Pei-Yuan Wei}} Viola was a UNIX-based programming/scripting language; the acronym stood for "Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application".

Pei's interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard, which he first encountered in 1989. Of that, Pei said, "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac... and I didn't even have a Mac". Only having access to X terminals, Pei, in 1990, created the first version of Viola for such terminals: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them..."{{cite book|author1=James Gillies|author2=R. Cailliau|title=How the Web was born: the story of the World Wide Web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pIH-JijUNS0C&pg=PA213|year=2000|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-286207-5|pages=213–217}}

Pei released Viola 0.8 in 1991.

After graduating, Pei developed Viola further while working with the XCF and startups.{{cite web|title=WWW people|url=http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/People.html|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|access-date=28 July 2010}} Later, he would be funded by O'Reilly Books, the technical publisher, which used the software to help demonstrate its Global Network Navigator site.{{cite news| url=https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html | work=Forbes | first=Tim | last=O'Reilly | title=Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book | date=23 February 2009}} His major goal was to create a version of Viola for the Internet:

{{blockquote|X-Window [sic] was a Unix-based system so it had TCP/IP built in and the Internet was a logical step. The question was how to transport his Viola pages across the Internet. He was on the verge of an independent invention of networked hypertext. 'And that's when I read Tim's e-mail about the World Wide Web' he explains. 'The URL was very, very clever, it was perfectly what I needed. He dropped Tim a line saying that he was thinking of writing a browser for X. 'Sounds like a good idea,' said Tim in a reply posted to www-talk on 9 December [1991]. Four days later, Pei Wei told www-talk that he had made a browser.|Gillies and Cailliau}}

Released in 1992, ViolaWWW was the first browser to add extended functionality such as embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. Early versions were received well at CERN. Ed Krol also highlighted the browser in his popular 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.

As ViolaWWW developed, it began to look more like HyperCard:

{{blockquote|It had a bookmark facility so that you could keep track of your favourite pages. It had buttons for going backwards and forwards and a history feature to keep track of the places you had been. As time went on, it acquired tables and graphics and by May 1993 it could even run programs.|Gillies and Cailliau}}

ViolaWWW was based on the Viola toolkit, which is a tool for the development and support of visual interactive media applications, with a multimedia web browser being a possible application. Viola ran under the X Window System and could be used to build complex hypermedia applications with features like applets and other interactive content as early as 1992.{{cite web| url=http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/51/webexny2010_what-is-web-20.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120215100147/http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/51/webexny2010_what-is-web-20.pdf |archive-date=2012-02-15 | title=What is Web 2.0? - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software | author=Tim O’Reilly | publisher=O'Reilly Media}}

Viola was the first web browser to have the following features:{{cite web|last=Berners-Lee|first=Tim|title=A Brief History of the Web|url=http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TimBook-old/History.html|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|access-date=17 August 2010|author-link=Tim Berners-Lee|orig-year=c.1993|date=9 August 1997}}

• client-side document insertion, predating frames, or syndication via JavaScript output writing, which are used commonly today.

• a simple stylesheet mechanism used for inserting style information such as fonts, color and alignments into a document.{{Cite web |title=Chapter 14, Stylesheet |url=http://viola.org/viola/book/chp14.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220118233304/http://viola.org/viola/book/chp14.html |archive-date=2022-01-18 |website=Viola in a Nutshell}} This was implemented in Viola well before CSS was developed in 1996:

(BODY,INPUT,P   FGColor=black
BGColor=grey70
BDColor=grey70
align=left
(H1             FGColor=white
BGColor=red
BDColor=black
align=center

• a sidebar panel used for displaying "meta" information, intra document navigational links, and other information, similar to (but not as sophisticated as) features found in several modern browsers.
• a scripting language that can be accessed from an HTML document,{{Cite web |title=Chapter 13, Extensibility |url=http://viola.org/viola/book/chp13.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220118223211/http://viola.org/viola/book/chp13.html |archive-date=2022-01-18 |website=Viola in a Nutshell}} such that an HTML document can embed highly interactive scripts/applets. This can be seen as the precursor to JavaScript and embedded objects.

• Forms{{cite web |title=ViolaWWW |url=https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/violawww-1992 |website=webdesignmuseum.org |publisher=Web Design Museum |access-date=17 February 2022}}

While ViolaWWW opened the door to the World Wide Web, its limitations, including it only being implemented on the X Window System, meant it could not compete with Mosaic, the browser which brought the Web into the mainstream.{{cite web |title=Mosaic -- The First Global Web Browser |url=http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_mosaic.htm |access-date=28 July 2010}} Among other things, Mosaic was easier to install on the computers most people were using. Originally developed for UNIX, Mosaic was soon ported to Microsoft Windows,Freedman, Alan. Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, 9th Edition. New York: Osborne, 2001, p. 629 a platform on which ViolaWWW never ran.

In 1999, Eolas Technologies and the University of California filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Microsoft, claiming infringement of U.S. patent 5,838,906, (covering browser plugins) by the Internet Explorer web browser. Eolas won the initial case in August 2003 and was awarded damages of ${{Formatprice|521000000|3}} from Microsoft.{{cite web |url=http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-plugins/2003Oct/0000.html |title=Eolas Technologies, Inc., and The Regents of the University of California v. Microsoft Corporation}} 99 C 626 The District Court reaffirmed the jury's decision in January 2004.

In March 2005, an appeals court directed that there be a retrial, overturning a decision that Microsoft pay $521 million in damages. The appeals court said that the initial ruling had ignored two key arguments put forward by Microsoft. Microsoft had wanted to show the court that ViolaWWW was prior art, since it was created in 1993 at the University of California, a year before the key patent were filed. Microsoft had also suggested that Michael David Doyle, Eolas' founder and a former University of California researcher, had intentionally concealed his knowledge of ViolaWWW when filing the patent claim.[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4314989.stm Court stays $521m Microsoft fine], BBC News, March 3, 2005. Microsoft subsequently settled with Eolas, in August 2007, without a retrial.{{cite news | title = High-profile, 8-year patent dispute settled | url = http://www.seattlepi.com/business/329766_msfteolas31.html | newspaper = Seattle Post-Intelligencer | date = 2007-08-30 }} Eolas continued to file suits against dozens of other technology companies.

In February 2012 a Texas jury found that two of Eolas' patents were invalid after testimony from several defendants including Tim Berners-Lee and Pei-Yuan Wei, credited as creator of the Viola browser. The testimony professed that the Viola browser included Eolas' claimed inventions before the filing date (September 7, 1993). There is "substantial evidence that Viola was publicly known and used" before the plaintiffs' alleged conception date, it added. The ruling effectively ended a pending lawsuit against 22 companies including Yahoo, Google, and many online retailers.{{cite news|last=Samuels|first=Julie|title=Why the Patent System Doesn't Play Well with Software: If Eolas Went the Other Way|url=https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/why-patent-system-doesnt-play|newspaper=Electronic Frontier Foundation|date=February 15, 2012}}

• History of the World Wide Web
• History of the web browser

{{Reflist}}

• {{Official website|viola.org}}
• {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100625180207/http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/aboutEolasMicrosoft.html |date=June 25, 2010 |title=Personal Comments on Eolas vs Microsoft, and the Viola Prior Art }}
• {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030926120826/http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/workshop/slides/wei/talk.html |date=September 26, 2003 |title=Presentation- Extensibility in WWW Browsers }}
• [http://ftp.cuhk.hk/pub/packages/info-systems/www/viola/ Download Viola]

{{Early web browsers}}

Category:POSIX web browsers

Category:1991 software

Category:1992 software

Category:Discontinued web browsers