Arachne (web browser) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Arachne is a full-screen Internet suite

Internet suite

An Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client , download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client....

containing a graphical web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

, email client, and dialer. It primarily runs on DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

based operating systems, but includes builds for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

as well, but should not be used with X. Arachne was originally created by Michal Polák (under the label xChaos software, later renamed to Arachne Labs) in the C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

language and compiled using Borland

Borland

Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...

C++ 3.1 compiler, but since been released under the GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

as Arachne GPL.

Background

Arachne is currently the most advanced graphical web browser available for DOS as it supports many file formats, protocols and standards. It is also capable of displaying between CGA

Color Graphics Adapter

The Color Graphics Adapter , originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card, and the first color computer display standard for the IBM PC....

640×200, two colors and VESA

VESA

VESA is an international standards body for computer graphics founded in 1989 by NEC Home Electronics and eight other video display adapter manufacturers.VESA's initial goal was to produce a standard for 800×600 SVGA resolution video displays...

1024×768, high color modes (65536 Colors). Arachne is designed for systems which do not have any windowing system

Windowing system

A windowing system is a component of a graphical user interface , and more specifically of a desktop environment, which supports the implementation of window managers, and provides basic support for graphics hardware, pointing devices such as mice, and keyboards...

s installed.

Arachne has image support for JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, PNG, BMP and animated GIF. It contains a subset of HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

4.0 and CSS

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

1.0, including full support for tables and frames. FTP

File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

, NNTP for USENET

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

forums, POP3, and SMTP are a few protocols which Arachne can handle. Arachne includes a full-fledged TCP/IP connection suite, which has support for some dial-up and Ethernet connections. However, Arachne currently has no support for JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

and SSL. Arachne can also be expanded with the use of addons for such tasks as watching DivX

DivX

DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. , including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and the...

movies, playing MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

files, IRC chat, RSS

RSS

-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...

, and viewing PDF documents.

The first release of Arachne with a known release date was 1.0 Beta 2 which came out 22 December 1996. The final official version by Arachne Labs was 1.70R3 for DOS (released 22 January 2001) and 1.66 beta for Linux (released 20 July 2000). While there have been several DOS versions Linux development lay dormant until May 24, 2008 when a (still beta) version, 1.93, for Linux branch was released.

Support

Arachne supports a limited subset of stylesheets and HTML. Known support as of version 1.93, GPL:

Style	Aliases	Options
color		#rgb or #rrggbb or a color name
background-color	background	#rgb or #rrggbb or a color name
font-size		%, px, pt
font-style		i[talics]
font-weight		b[old]
text-decoration	font-decoration	u[nderline]

Derivatives

xChaos software licensed full source code of Arachne to Caldera UK in 1997. People from Caldera UK added Novell's dialer and TCP/IP stack, animated GIFs, printing on a multitude of printers, JavaScript (beta), completely changed the design of the browser (customizable), implemented their own support for frames, and succeeded in compiling it as a 32-bit protected mode extended DOS application (utilizing DPMI using DJGPP

DJGPP

DJGPP is a development suite for 386+ IBM PC compatibles which supports DOS-enabled operating systems. It is guided by DJ Delorie, who began the project in 1989. It is a port of the popular GCC compiler, as well as mostly GNU utilities such as bash, find, tar, ls, awk, sed, and ld to DPMI...

, GNU compiler for DOS), while Arachne is a 16-bit application at the moment. This program was sold as DR-WebSpyder; the name was to associate it with DR-DOS

DR-DOS

DR-DOS is an MS-DOS-compatible operating system for IBM PC-compatible personal computers, originally developed by Gary Kildall's Digital Research and derived from Concurrent PC DOS 6.0, which was an advanced successor of CP/M-86...

, which Caldera owned at the time. Later, when Caldera

Caldera (company)

Caldera was a US-based software company founded in 1994 to develop Linux- and DOS-based operating system products.- Caldera :Caldera, Inc...

had transferred DR-DOS to its branch company Caldera Thin Clients, which became Lineo

Lineo

Lineo was a thin client and embedded systems company spun out of Caldera Thin Clients, on 20 July 1999.Caldera Thin Clients, Inc., had been created as a subsidiary of Caldera, Inc., on 2 September 1998...

, the browser was renamed Lineo EmBrowser.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Background

Support

Derivatives

See also

External links