MOSAIC 2.0: IT'S LOOSE!

Whither Mosaic?

• How many people have used or seen Mosaic before today?

• The basic ideas behind Mosaic (the 1.0 versions on three platforms):
  • Hypermedia client for information access over TCP/IP (the Internet) -- based on the World Wide Web.

  • Talks to a wide variety of servers:
    • HTTP (World Wide Web)
    • Gopher
    • FTP
    • NNTP (Usenet news)
    • Through gateways (usually Gopher or HTTP): WAIS, Archie, X.500, Techinfo, relational databases, ...

  • Built on standard, accepted, used FORMATS and PROTOCOLS, with plenty of built-in flexibility for the future.

    Important part of this: Uniform Resource Locators. Point to information anywhere in the world, using any access method (protocol), in a stateless manner. Point-to-point jumps FROM anywhere TO anywhere in the global information space.

• State of Mosaic in the world today:
  • ~100,000 users, mostly X.

  • Mac and Windows version 1.0's just released.

  • Byte count for HTTP over NSFnet climbing VERY fast -- rough indication of Mosaic activity.

  • Hundreds of rich hypermedia servers online and coming online.

  • Applications growing: e.g., world's first professionally-produced hypermedia magazine distributed over the Internet -- GNN from O'Reilly and Associates.

  • User support is swamping us :-).

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MOSAIC 2.0! What's the big deal?

Thousands of user demands, and we listened!

• INTERRUPTIBLE I/O.

  Any time something takes too long or doesn't seem to be working, just click on the spinning icon.

  This makes Internet surfing (and information retrieval in general) SAFE.

• DIRECT WAIS ACCESS.

  Mosaic 2.0 links directly to the freeWAIS 0.x client libraries, so it can talk the WAIS variant of Z39.50 DIRECTLY to servers.

  This also means:

  • Mosaic can pull binary files of arbitrary types off of WAIS servers, and do arbitrary things with them.

  • Mosaic can handle multiformat responses from WAIS servers (e.g. search on text, get back your choice of text, image, or movie) intelligently.

  Examples:
  • Direct access to CNIDR WAIS directory of servers:

    [[ Unarchived form element ]]

  • Direct access to InterNIC RFC WAIS server:

    [[ Unarchived form element ]]

  • A search on the term "MIME" in the InterNIC RFC WAIS server.

  • RFC 1437 from the InterNIC RFC WAIS server.

  • Direct access to White House Papers WAIS server:

    [[ Unarchived form element ]]

  • A Search on the term "Perot" in the White House Papers WAIS server.

• FILL-OUT FORMS.

  Background: Mosaic uses an SGML-based markup language (HTML) for formatted hypermedia documents.

  Now INTERFACES can be described inside HTML documents.

  Graphical interface elements used include text entry areas, password entry fields, toggle buttons, option menus, scrolled lists, image maps.

  Multiple interface elements can be interspersed throughout normal text/graphics/hyperlinks and grouped together into a FORM. (And, multiple forms can be in a single document.)

  There is a standard method for form SUBMISSION -- sending the contents the user has entered to a remote server.

  A server that has received a submitted form can do ANYTHING it wants -- query a Z39.50 search engine, query a relational database, whatever -- and return any data it wants.

  Thus: standard format/protocol for complex interfaces and submission to servers. Servers are customized per application, and EASY to create.

  Result: ONE client, MANY servers, RICH interaction.

• AUTHENTICATION.

  Username/password based verification of identity; about same security as Telnet -- password not passed over network as cleartext, but not encrypted.

  HOW IT WORKS: Client requests document. Server says "you can't have that unless you give me the right username/password". Mosaic asks user for username/password and resends query with authentication information. Server can then permit or deny access according to whatever criteria it wants.

  Mosaic smart about repeated accesses.

  Thanks to CERN for authentication!

  SOON: Full two-way datastream encryption, using the public key technology of your choice (e.g. PEM).

• REDIRECTION.

  Servers can tell Mosaic: "go get this URL instead".

  Simple idea, powerful consequences.

  This makes DISTRIBUTED GRAPHICAL INFORMATION SPACE NAVIGATION easy. In response to a user's click on an image map, a server can tell Mosaic to go anywhere in the world to find the desired information. Example.

• NATIVE HDF/NETCDF DATA VIEWING.

  Self-describing portable binary data files, possibly containing complex hierarchical structures and many types of data.

  Mosaic constructs a hypermedia interface to the data on the fly, displaying images, providing hyperlinks to go deeper in the structure, etc.

  Examples:

  • An HDF file of a galactic jet.
  • A complex HDF file containing lots of different data elements, including hyperlinks within annotations.
  • A netCDF file.
  • An image of NCSA Director Larry Smarr.
  • A huge (5+ megabytes) HDF file of satellite weather image and associated metadata.

• FULL CUSTOMIZABILITY.

  One side-effect: makes it simple to allow local shell scripts to be fired off by clicking on hyperlinks.

• LOTS MORE LITTLE THINGS...

• BINARIES AVAILABLE for DEC (Alpha & Ultrix), HP 700 series, IBM AIX 3.2, SGI IRIX, SunOS, Solaris -- easy to try it out! (Or compile it yourself.)

  FTP to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, directory /Mosaic.

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WHAT'S NEXT???

Who knows?

Something things are certain:

• Incremental improvements (formatting/display, protocols, fill-out forms, etc.).

• Cross-platform (Mac & Windows) support for most or all of 2.0's features.

• Full encryption.

What would enable APPLICATIONS?

What would make possible things that haven't been possible before?

One answer is a given: ever-smarter servers.

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More demo material:

• NCSA Mosaic Demo Document
• What's New
• Internet Resources Meta-Index