NCSA Mosaic Features List
Note
This list is up to date for version 2.4 of NCSA Mosaic.
Features List
- 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.
- Friendly X/Motif user interface.
- Color and monochrome default X resource settings.
- Multiple independent document viewing windows.
- Completely interruptible network input/output, with full status
indication during network operations.
- 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.
- Support for standard World Wide Web authentication scheme,
providing security about equivalent to telnet's username/password
scheme.
- Customizable encryption hooks to allow external PEM or PGP encryption
to be used to request and receive encrypted documents.
- Support for encrypted submission of forms.
- Support for first time encryption of all http communication.
- 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.
- Ability to pass any or all URL access methods to a proxy gateway
to simulate direct network connection for those behind firewalls.
- Direct access to WAIS databases, including support for binary
files and multiformat responses.
- 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.
- Full customizability of recognized formats, external viewers, and
file extensions.
- Ability to fire off arbitrary client-side shell scripts in response
to hyperlink activations via format/viewer customization options.
- Ability to natively view data inside HDF and netCDF scientific data
files, with powerful hypermedia interface to explore internal
structure of data files.
- 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.
- Automatic dithering of inlined images on monochrome displays.
- Support of GIF89 transparent background in inlined images.
- Flexible inlined-image caching with customizable image cache size.
- Delayed image loading mode, to avoid automatic loading of all
images in accessed documents for users with slow network
connections.
- Visited document history list per window.
- Global history with previously visited locations visually distinct;
global history is persistent across sessions.
- Hotlist/bookmark capability -- keep list of interesting documents,
add/remove/rename items, list is persistent across sessions.
- 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.)
- Audio (voice) annotations with GUI for controlling recording process
(SGI, SGI, and HP only).
- Transparent and automatic uncompression of compressed (.Z) and
gzip'd (.z or .gz) files (over FTP, HTTP0, HTTP/1.0, local files,
and Gopher).
- "Load to local disk" mode, for pulling down arbitrary binary files
and saving them to local disk without viewing them.
- In-document search capability.
- Fully 8-bit clean for formatted and plain text.
- On-the-fly font and hyperlink style selection.
- Hardcoded menu entries for popular network starting points,
including the NCSA Internet Resources Meta-Index.
- Keyword search capability (for WAIS, Gopher, Archie, etc.).
- Cut and paste formatted text into other X windows.
- Ability to display arbitrarily long documents.
- Save/mail/print documents in several formats, including formatted
ASCII text and PostScript.
- Online hypertext help and FAQ list.
- No config or resource file installation required; self-contained
executable.
- Extremely customizable via compile-time definitions, X resources,
and standard configuration file formats (including mailcap files
for format/viewer customization).
- Can be controlled by signals to allow use as a full-featured help
or information presentation subsystems by existing applications.
- Integrated with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast
documents into real-time networked workgroup collaboration
sessions.
- It's PURIFY'D!!!