Arena (web Browser) - History

History

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 at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Bristol, 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 in web browser development. Raggett demonstrated the browser at the first World Wide Web Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1994 and the 1994 ISOC conference in Prague to show text flow around images, forms, and other aspects of HTML later termed as the HTML+ specification. Raggett subsequently partnered with CERN, to develop Arena further as a proof 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. At the Web World conference in Orlando, in early 1995, Raggett demonstrated the different new features of Arena.

Since July 1994 Lie was integrating libwww and CSS and helping Raggett. In October 1995, Yves Lafon joined the team for a year to provide support for HTML form and style sheet development.

Arena was originally released for Unix, and although there was talk of a Windows and Macintosh port, neither came to fruition.

Despite its time of development, Arena is in certain areas a relatively modern browser; because it functioned as a testbed, it saw the implementation of new technologies long before they became mainstream, i.e. CSS. Arena implemented many elements of the HTML3 and HTML3.2 specification including math elements that were deprecated in HTML4, HTML tables, and experimental style sheets.