Arena, which predatedNetscape Navigator andMicrosoft'sInternet Explorer, featured a number of innovations used later in commercial products.[17] It was the first browser to support background images,tables, text flow around images, and inline mathematical expressions.[1][18][19]
The Arena browser served as the W3C'stestbed browser from 1994 to 1996 when it was succeeded by theAmaya project.[8][20][21]
Dave Raggett, realizing that there were not enough working hours left for him to succeed at what he felt was an immensely important task, continued writing his browser at home. There he would sit at a large computer that occupied a fair portion of the dining room table, sharing its slightly sticky surface with paper, crayons, Lego bricks and bits of half-eaten cookies left by the children.
In 1993,Dave Raggett, then atHewlett-Packard (HP) inBristol, England devoted his spare time to developing Arena on which he hoped to demonstrate new and future HTML specifications. Development of the browser was slow because Raggett was the lone developer and HP,which like many other computer corporations at the time, was unconvinced that the Internet would succeed and thus did not consider investing inweb browser development.[citation needed][22] Raggett demonstrated the browser at thefirst World Wide Web Conference inGeneva, Switzerland in 1994[23] and the 1994ISOC conference inPrague[24] to show text flow around images, forms, and other aspects of HTML later termed as the HTML+ specification.[1] Raggett subsequently partnered with CERN, to develop Arena further as aproof of concept browser for this work. Using the Arena browser, Dave Raggett, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,Håkon Wium Lie and others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions, resizable tables, image backgrounds, HTML math, and other features.[8][19][25][26][27][28] At the Web World conference inOrlando, in early 1995, Raggett demonstrated the different new features of Arena.[1]
Since July 1994 Lie was integrating libwww and CSS and helping Raggett.[29][30] In October 1995, Yves Lafon joined the team for a year to provide support forHTML form andstyle sheet development.[31][32]
Despite its time of development, Arena is in certain areas a relatively modern browser; because it functioned as a testbed,[36] it saw the implementation of new technologies long before they became mainstream, e.g. CSS. Arena implemented many elements of the HTML3 and HTML3.2 specification including math elements[6] that were deprecated in HTML4, HTML tables,[8] and experimental style sheets.[8]
The development history and thesource code of earliersoftware builds are not well documented,[37][38][39][40] because the developers did not want to distribute the source code until they considered the browser to be stable.[41] In version 0.95, support for inlineJPEG images was added.[42] In version 0.96, support was added for theFTP,NNTP, andGopherprotocols, as well as experimental support for CSS.[8][43] In Arena 0.98 Dave Beckett added full PNG support.[5]
The W3C published 5 versions of the Arena beta-1 between 27 November 1995 and 8 February 1996 improving16-bitoperating system support[44] and reimplementing CSS (which was still aWorking Draft).[44]The W3C and theINRIA, a French national research institution, gave additional funding to develop CSS.[45][46][47][48] To better implement and write CSS, an experimentalstyle sheet for Arena was developed. On 22 May 1996, the W3C announced that Amaya will replace Arena as their new testbed and that the W3C was looking for a new maintainer because the W3C did not have the resources for two testbeds.[49]
Beta-2 had two builds (beta-2a: 28 February 1996 and beta-2b: 21 March 1996) and introduced a newAPI for communicating with other applications.[52][53][54] Also, the internal component libwww was updated to version 4.[52]OMRON Corporation developed aninternationalized version that could display Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters in one page.[55] OMRON's Arena supports bothISO-2022 andUnicode. It is able to guess thecharset parameter automatically ifcharset parameter isn't specified in Content-Type field.[51][56][57]
Beta-3a released on 14 August 1996 and Beta-3b released on 16 September 1996 introduced support for the Linux operating systems onm68k andDEC Alpha.[58] CSS 1 support was enhanced[58] and the internationalized version was also updated.[51] Between the two beta-3 releases the W3C was already looking at a new testbed[8] and switched later to theAmaya browser.[58] Beta-3 was the last involvement of the W3C in the development of Arena. On 17 February 1997,Yggdrasil Computing took over the role of developing the browser.[9]
On 17 February 1997, the W3C approved Yggdrasil to coordinate future development of Arena.[59] Development was taken over by Yggdrasil, with the idea to turn Arena into an open sourceX Window System browser licensed under theGNU General Public License.[60] Yggdrasil licensed an Xemulator from Pearl Software to port Arena to Windows,[9] although these builds were never released. Yggdrasil did not provide any officialbinaries at this time, because they did not want to expand the community with alpha-quality software.[11] Although users would be able to run Arena bycompiling it from the published source code, volunteers created unofficial finished binaries.[61] Yggdrasil had planned to implement browsing features that were already standard in competitive web browsers,[11][61] which resulted in the newbookmarks feature in version 0.3.18 on 7 April 1997.[4]
Development stopped in late 1998, with the final release being on 25 November 1998.[3][note 1] TheW3C did not consider demonstration projects to be high priority, and thus, the Arena browser was entirely shut down in favor of outside Linux-community development.[62]
Arena was built using the multi-threadedlibrary of common code called the W3C Reference Library, now called libwww.[70][75][76] Originally, the Arena browser was built on top ofXlib as Raggett considered the programming manuals forMotif and other X libraries to be rather daunting.
Arena has three different systems for theversion numbering. The W3C pre-beta phase uses a system of numbers up to 0.99, which indicated that these builds were inalpha-quality and the browser could have new features. The beta phase changed the version numbering to a system consisting of the word "Beta-" beta followed by a number. After the beta-phase, the final product would have the version 1.0. After Yggdrasil overtook the development, the development status was changed from the W3C beta builds back to alpha, implying that the Arena browser wasn't yet ready for release.[11] Thebeta-3e version numbering then became0.3.5 inGNU style[11][77] Development remained in alpha stage until 0.3.62, and never again advanced to beta.
Although Arena ran well,[78] there were inconsistent reports about the speed of Arena.[68][78]
The biggest problems were that Arena couldn't handle forms,[68][78] and that the PNG support was broken from version 0.3.07 on. Earlier Arena releases had fullalpha-channel support, but only with using Arena's own "sandy" background pattern.[3][68][79] Theanimated GIFs extension – presented byNetscape in March 1996 – did not work properly.[68]
Other problems included rendering problems with tables,[68] and the lack of integration of so-calledextended HTML code, i.e. the<BGCOLOR>-tag[68] and the<DIVALIGN>-tag.[68]
Earlier versions of Arena (until 0.3.26 (01.06.97))[80] did not support the email MIME.[81]
^Because the official page is no longer online, the older source code and precompiled builds of Yggdrasil's development are no longer available, althoughDebian'srepository archive contains the three newest builds.
^Kreutzmann, Dr. Helge (6 January 2010)."WWW-Browsers for Linux". helgefjell.de.Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved3 June 2010.
^Mukaigawa, Shin'ichi (3 February 1996)."A国際化WWWブラウザの設計と実装 --- i18n Arena" [Design and Implementation of I18N WWW Browser --- i18n Arena] (in Japanese).OMRON. Archived fromthe original on 13 October 2006. Retrieved7 June 2010.
^"MAPS: Minutes and APpendiceS"(PDF) (in Dutch). Nederlandstalige TEX Gebruikersgroep. 5 September 1995.Archived(PDF) from the original on 24 July 2011. Retrieved10 June 2010.
^Kelly, Brian (1994)."Running A World-Wide Web Service".handbook. AGOCG (Advisory Group on Computer Graphics).Archived from the original on 4 October 2011. Retrieved9 August 2011.
^QingLong, Lu (24 March 1998)."Arena change history". Yggdrasil Computing. Archived fromthe original on 28 February 2003. Retrieved3 June 2010.beta-3e aka 0.3.05 (12.12.96)
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