NCSA Mosaic Features List

Note

Features List

• Support for accessing documents, images, audio, video, animations, and data through World Wide Web, Gopher, WAIS, FTP, NNTP/Usenet news, telnet, tn3270, and local files; and via gateways, Techinfo, TeXinfo, Archie, CSO qi/ph, relational databases, and other sources.
• Friendly X/Motif user interface.
• Color and monochrome default X resource settings.
• Multiple independent document viewing windows.
• Completely interruptible network input/output, with full status indication during network operations.
• Support for interactive fill-out forms inside documents, to enable powerful database and search engine front-ends. Fill-out forms can contain text entry areas (single- or multi-line), option buttons, radio buttons, option menus, scrolled lists, and image maps. Fill-out form elements are instantiated as Motif widgets.
• Support for standard World Wide Web authentication scheme, providing security about equivalent to telnet's username/password scheme.
• Customizable encryption hooks to allow external PEM or PGP encryption to be used to request and receive encrypted documents.
• Support for encrypted submission of forms.
• Support for first time encryption of all http communication.
• Extensive HTTP/1.0 support, including the ability to allow a remote server to return URL redirections rather than documents for transparent forwarding of information pointers.
• Ability to pass any or all URL access methods to a proxy gateway to simulate direct network connection for those behind firewalls.
• Direct access to WAIS databases, including support for binary files and multiformat responses.
• Built-in support for recognizing and handling GIF, JPEG, TIFF, audio, AIFF, DVI, MPEG, MIME, XWD, RGB, HDF, PostScript files and forking off appropriate viewers.
• Full customizability of recognized formats, external viewers, and file extensions.
• Ability to fire off arbitrary client-side shell scripts in response to hyperlink activations via format/viewer customization options.
• Ability to natively view data inside HDF and netCDF scientific data files, with powerful hypermedia interface to explore internal structure of data files.
• Inlined images in formatted (HTML) text: X bitmaps and GIF images can be included anywhere inside a document, and can act as hyperlink anchors. Image files themselves can be located anywhere on the network. Images can act as maps, so clicking on them sends coordinates of click to remote server.
• Automatic dithering of inlined images on monochrome displays.
• Support of GIF89 transparent background in inlined images.
• Flexible inlined-image caching with customizable image cache size.
• Delayed image loading mode, to avoid automatic loading of all images in accessed documents for users with slow network connections.
• Visited document history list per window.
• Global history with previously visited locations visually distinct; global history is persistent across sessions.
• Hotlist/bookmark capability -- keep list of interesting documents, add/remove/rename items, list is persistent across sessions.
• Personal annotations with GUI annotation entry dialog; annotations can later be edited or deleted, and hyperlinks to existing annotations are inlined into subsequent accesses of an annotated document. (Any document from any server via any access method can be annotated.)
• Audio (voice) annotations with GUI for controlling recording process (SGI, SGI, and HP only).
• Transparent and automatic uncompression of compressed (.Z) and gzip'd (.z or .gz) files (over FTP, HTTP0, HTTP/1.0, local files, and Gopher).
• "Load to local disk" mode, for pulling down arbitrary binary files and saving them to local disk without viewing them.
• In-document search capability.
• Fully 8-bit clean for formatted and plain text.
• On-the-fly font and hyperlink style selection.
• Hardcoded menu entries for popular network starting points, including the NCSA Internet Resources Meta-Index.
• Keyword search capability (for WAIS, Gopher, Archie, etc.).
• Cut and paste formatted text into other X windows.
• Ability to display arbitrarily long documents.
• Save/mail/print documents in several formats, including formatted ASCII text and PostScript.
• Online hypertext help and FAQ list.
• No config or resource file installation required; self-contained executable.
• Extremely customizable via compile-time definitions, X resources, and standard configuration file formats (including mailcap files for format/viewer customization).
• Can be controlled by signals to allow use as a full-featured help or information presentation subsystems by existing applications.
• Integrated with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast documents into real-time networked workgroup collaboration sessions.
• It's PURIFY'D!!!