Email-based web browser
Agora
was a
World Wide Web
email
browser
and was a
proof of concept
to help people to use the full internet.
[5]
[6]
Agora was an email-based web browser designed for non-graphic terminals and to help people without full access to the internet such as in developing countries or without a permanent internet connection.
[7]
[8]
Similar to W3Gate, Agora was a server application designed to fetch HTML documents through e-mail rather than http.
[9]
Functionality
[
edit
]
Agora, for those who cannot be in the
Arena
[3]
Agora was not a
client
application. To access the Internet you had to install the Agora browser on a
server
and send Agora an email with the requested
URL
.
[5]
The Agora application would send an email back with the requested content of the link. The email which was sent by the server, contained the
HTML
source code
so that a normal web browser was able to display the page as it should be
[10]
or in a
lynx
-style
.
[11]
Different options made browsing easier.
[12]
The servers could be configured differently so that some servers sent emails back containing only
JavaScript
, because the content was deeper on the page.
[10]
Agora was praised for handling
frames
correctly, although other similar applications were able to handle this by serving the source code and rerequest the used frame.
[10]
Features
[
edit
]
Although Agora was based on email communication it was able to search by different
search engines
:
Archie
,
MetaCrawler
,
Lycos
,
Yahoo!
,
WAIS
Search in Oxford Univ,
Hyper RFC
,
WebCrawler
,
Veronica Search
,
AltaVista
and
Google
.
[13]
Agora limits the number of requests processed in each message to 10 to prevent the service from being attacked by messages containing excessive commands that could cause a
DDOS
attack.
[9]
Supported protocols
[
edit
]
The Agora server is based on the
Line Mode Browser
[14]
and on the
libwww
and thus it supported different kinds of
internet protocols
besides the classical
http
and
gopher
browsing, namely
NNTP
,
[15]
Archie,
[15]
Finger
,
[15]
WAIS.
[13]
Although Agora was able to handle many protocols, the interactive
telnet
protocol was an exception.
[2]
Version history
[
edit
]
From Agora 0.7d it was possible to search some searchable sites by adding the search terms separated by spaces after the URL, but this would not work with forms.
[2]
Since Agora version 0.8e it was possible to split the requested URLs into two or more lines.
[2]
Data compression
with
uuencoded
by
gzip
or
zip
was also integrated.
[2]
Agora version 0.8f determined frames and linked pictures goto and the answer mail get help in these cases.
[2]
Limitations
[
edit
]
One limitation of Agora was that it had an integrated limit for the output mail of about 10,000 lines (originally 5,000) primarily to protect users and the network from excessive bandwidth/resource usage.
[2]
[9]
With this limitation, uuencoded files would not exceed 1
megabyte
because some
operating systems
and
email clients
had problems with files larger than 1MB.
[2]
Uuencoded files used too much bandwidth and so data compression was integrated.
[2]
Since most websites contained links to inline images or binary files such as archives/executables Agora had to uuencode these files prior to sending them.
[5]
[9]
Usenet support was read only because the server was anonymous.
[13]
Further development
[
edit
]
In version 0.9 users were able to fill in forms.
[4]
This version was never developed.
[
citation needed
]
The
World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) servers were shut down because of the heavy load. Secret created the software to set up as a local strategy, but that did not work at that time. The consequences were that the W3C servers got too many requests and they had to shut down their Agora implementation.
[16]
[17]
System requirements
[
edit
]
To run Agora on a server, the server had to have Perl installed.
[4]
The
libwww
binaries
www_*.*.Z
had to be in the same directory.
[4]
Criticism
[
edit
]
Agora ignored completely the different kinds of applets which were popular at that time:
Tcl
,
Tk
,
Java
and
Python
.
[2]
Agora could not handle
HTML tables
properly.
[2]
The Usenet support was incomplete and created problems in translating the answer in formatted text; also, some newsgroups caused a crash.
[13]
It could not handle Chinese, Japanese, Korean web pages.
[13]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Secret, Arthur (30 April 1996).
"Arthur Secret"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Retrieved
23 June
2010
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j
k
Sasse, Hugh.
"Agora: Retrieving WWW Documents through mail"
.
De Montfort University
. Archived from
the original
on 17 January 2003
. Retrieved
24 June
2010
.
- ^
a
b
Secret, Arthur (2 July 1997).
"Agora"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Retrieved
20 November
2013
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
README
file in the packed source code and in the packed executable of Agora 0.8.
- ^
a
b
c
Secret, Arthur (12 November 1996).
"Agora"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Archived from
the original
on 6 June 1997
. Retrieved
20 June
2010
.
- ^
Daniel Dardailler; Judy Brewer.
"FINAL REPORT - DE 4105 - WAI"
.
Web Accessibility Initiative
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Retrieved
23 June
2010
.
- ^
Sosa-Iudicissa, Marcelo C.; Organization, Pan American Health; Association, International Medical Informatics (February 1997).
Internet, telematics, and health
. IOS Press. p. 145.
ISBN
978-90-5199-289-2
.
- ^
Tim Berners Lee
(1 May 1995).
"Getting Started with WWW"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Retrieved
25 June
2010
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
Manfred Bogen; Guido Hansen; Michael Lenz.
"W3Gate: Use and Abuse"
. German National Research Center for Information Technology.
Archived
from the original on 21 June 2010
. Retrieved
29 June
2010
.
- ^
a
b
c
"G.E.Boyd's How To Do Just About Anything by email - Part 1"
.
GeoCities
. 11 August 2000. Archived from
the original
on 17 August 2000
. Retrieved
24 June
2010
.
- ^
WWWWolf (6 May 2001).
"Agora"
.
Everything2
.
Archived
from the original on 17 June 2010
. Retrieved
23 June
2010
.
- ^
Secret, Arthur (23 June 1995).
"Retrieval of documents through mail"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
. Archived from
the original
on 6 June 1997
. Retrieved
20 June
2010
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Secret, Arthur (13 August 1996).
"Agora: Retrieving WWW Documents through mail"
. Archived from
the original
on 13 July 2010
. Retrieved
25 June
2010
.
- ^
Sendall, Mike (29 March 1995).
"World Wide Web Clients"
.
World Wide Web Consortium
.
Archived
from the original on 23 August 2010
. Retrieved
10 August
2010
.
- ^
a
b
c
"G.E.Boyd's How To Do Just About Anything by email - Part 2"
.
GeoCities
. 10 September 2000. Archived from
the original
on 10 March 2001
. Retrieved
25 June
2010
.
- ^
Moberg, Vic (16 November 1995).
"WWW> Agora Web by Email Service Down for the Count"
.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
. Retrieved
26 June
2010
.
- ^
"Landmark's E-Mail Echo"
.
Landmark Computer Labs
. 1 February 1996
. Retrieved
26 June
2010
.
External links
[
edit
]
|
---|
Products and
standards
| |
---|
Organizations
| | Working groups
| |
---|
Community & business groups
| |
---|
Closed groups
| |
---|
|
---|
Software
| |
---|
Conferences
| |
---|
|
---|
|
Active clients
| |
---|
Discontinued clients
| |
---|
Previously supported
| |
---|
Server software
| |
---|
Search engines
| |
---|
Content
| |
---|
Hosts
| |
---|
People
| |
---|
|
---|
People
| |
---|
Things
| |
---|
Frameworks
| |
---|
Books
| |
---|
Software
| |
---|
Related
| |
---|
|
|
---|
|
1990s
|
---|
1990
| |
---|
1991
| |
---|
1992
| |
---|
1993
| |
---|
1994
| |
---|
1995
| |
---|
1996
| |
---|
1997
| |
---|
1998
| |
---|
1999
| |
---|
|
|
2000s
|
---|
2000
| |
---|
2001
| |
---|
2002
| |
---|
2003
| |
---|
2004
| |
---|
2005
| |
---|
2006
| |
---|
2007
| |
---|
2008
| |
---|
2009
| |
---|
|
|
2010s
|
---|
2010
| |
---|
2011
| |
---|
2012
| |
---|
2013
| |
---|
2014
| |
---|
2015
| |
---|
2016
| |
---|
2017
| |
---|
2018
| |
---|
2019
| |
---|
|
|
|
|
|
---|
- Features
- standards
- protocols
|
---|
|
|
|
|
|