ncsa-mosaic/FEATURES

NCSA Mosaic Features List
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This list is up to date for version 2.5 of NCSA Mosaic.

 o 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.
 o Friendly X/Motif user interface.
 o Color and monochrome default X resource settings.
 o Multiple independent document viewing windows.
 o Completely interruptible network input/output, with full status indication
   during network operations.
 o 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.
 o Support for standard World Wide Web authentication scheme, providing
   security about equivalent to telnet's username/password scheme.
 o Customizable encryption hooks to allow external PEM or PGP encryption to
   be used to request and receive encrypted documents.
 o Support for encrypted submission of forms.
 o Support for first time encryption of all http communication.
 o 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.
 o Ability to pass any or all URL access methods to a proxy gateway to simulate
   direct network connection for those behind firewalls.
 o Direct access to WAIS databases, including support for binary files and
   multiformat responses.
 o 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.
 o Full customizability of recognized formats, external viewers, and file
   extensions.
 o Ability to fire off arbitrary client-side shell scripts in response to
   hyperlink
   activations via format/viewer customization options.
 o Ability to natively view data inside HDF and netCDF scientific data files,
   with powerful hypermedia interface to explore internal structure of data
   files.
 o 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.
 o Automatic dithering of inlined images on monochrome displays.
 o Support of GIF89 transparent background in inlined images.
 o Flexible inlined-image caching with customizable image cache size.
 o Delayed image loading mode, to avoid automatic loading of all images in
   accessed documents for users with slow network connections.
 o Visited document history list per window.
 o Global history with previously visited locations visually distinct; global
   history is persistent across sessions.
 o Hotlist/bookmark capability -- keep list of interesting documents,
   add/remove/rename items, list is persistent across sessions.  Now stored
   in nested HTML.
 o 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.)
 o Audio (voice) annotations with GUI for controlling recording process (SGI,
   SGI, and HP only).
 o Transparent and automatic uncompression of compressed (.Z) and gzip'd (.z or
   .gz) files (over FTP, HTTP0, HTTP/1.0, local files, and Gopher).
 o "Load to local disk" mode, for pulling down arbitrary binary files and
    saving them to local disk without viewing them.
 o In-document search capability.
 o Fully 8-bit clean for formatted and plain text.
 o On-the-fly font and hyperlink style selection.
 o Hardcoded menu entries for popular network starting points, including the
   NCSA Internet Resources Meta-Index.
 o Keyword search capability (for WAIS, Gopher, Archie, etc.).
 o Cut and paste formatted text into other X windows.
 o Ability to display arbitrarily long documents.
 o Save/mail/print documents in several formats, including formatted ASCII
   text and PostScript.
 o Online hypertext help and FAQ list.
 o No config or resource file installation required; self-contained
   executable.
 o Extremely customizable via compile-time definitions, X resources, and
   standard configuration file formats (including mailcap files for
   format/viewer customization).
 o Can be controlled by signals to allow use as a full-featured help or
   information presentation subsystems by existing applications.
 o Integrated with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast documents into
   real-time networked workgroup collaboration sessions.
 o It's PURIFY'D!!!
 o Common Client Interface (CCI) support to allow external applications
   to communicate with Mosaic via TCP/IP.
 o Kiosk mode
 o Editor Hook