On the Nets

Greg R. Notess
Reference Librarian
Montana State University

The Internet in 1996

DATABASE, December 1996
Copyright © Online Inc.

[96 Review] The Internet continues on course as the major online news event of 1996. To some degree, the Internet itself has moved a bit into the background while the information content and activities on the Web have become the primary news focus. You have probably heard stories of friends and relatives getting Internet accounts this past year, if they had not already done so. The awkward URL http:// syntax increased its presence in advertising, on television, on radio, in print, and in almost every other communication medium. While sites of popular interest, personal hobby, and commercial trade have increased dramatically in number, there has been a steady growth in sites with quality content for information professionals as well. As the content grows, the Internet software side has grown even faster with many new features and additions.

BROWSER WARS

From the many competing Web browsers, Netscape Navigator remained the dominant force in this important market. With estimates ranging from 70-90% of market share, Navigator has been the most common browser used in almost all settings: educational, commercial, and the home market. Many companies ceased developing their own browsers and signed agreements with Netscape instead. While Netscape Navigator consolidated its market share, a major competitor appeared on the horizon. The browser war between Netscape and the newer Microsoft Internet Explorer has captivated the Internet press this year.

How can it be much of a war when one side maintains the vast majority of the market share? Easily, when the other side of the battleground features the desktop computing behemoth Microsoft. Internet Explorer is free to all users and is included with Microsoft's Windows 95. Rather than sticking to a strict interpretation of HTML, Internet Explorer uses Netscape's own strategy of both displaying the latest Netscape-introduced HTML coding and adding some unique features of its own. Aimed primarily at Windows 95 users, versions of Internet Explorer also are available for Windows NT, Macintosh, and Windows 3.1. The marketing arm of Microsoft has been actively pushing Internet Explorer as the way to browse the Net.

Netscape has not remained idle during Microsoft's aggressive promotion of Internet Explorer. Netscape continues to introduce new beta versions and full releases of Navigator. New features include the adoption of Java as a programming language that can run applets within the Netscape window; the addition of the scripting language JavaScript for less complex tasks; integrating an email reader and news reader into Navigator; the use of plug-in applications to expand the functionality of Navigator; and the introduction of frames for dividing up the Navigator window. With most new features introduced by either Netscape or Microsoft, the other will soon follow. All these additions make the program grow significantly larger and more complex, to the dismay of some. At the same time, the added functionality is a significant gain for Web designers and users.

Can these super software programs even be called browsers anymore? Netscape has been pushing the name Navigator, emphasizing the ability to use Navigator to find your way through the Net. Explorer has a similar ring to it. The inclusion of an email reader and newsreader within Netscape Navigator certainly pushes the boundaries of what has traditionally been called a browser. Java, Internet Explorer's inclusion of ActiveX controls, and Netscape's push of their Open Network Environment (ONE), further move these software packages beyond the scope of a simple World Wide Web client.

One of the most active directions of growth on the Net has been in its multimedia and interactive capabilities.
New developments in the official and unofficial HTML standards have greatly expanded the display options on a Web page. New table features, the division tag, Netscape's spacers, and most radical of all, frames, all give Web designers significantly more power in their development of online Internet documents. The greater use of plug-ins and Java-enabled browsers extend the capabilities far beyond the constraints of HTML.

Part of the development over the past year has been in the less glamorous steady development of all the many software products used on the Internet. Not only the browsers, but many other Internet software packages, from bookmark managers to phone software to 3D rendering products, have seen fevered development to increase their ease of use and range of features.

MULTIMEDIA AND INTERACTIVITY

One of the most active directions of growth on the Net has been in its multimedia and interactive capabilities. The big push with the programming language Java, with its incorporation into Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, has been that it can greatly expand the capabilities of these popular software programs by enabling interactivity and expanded capabilities within a Web browser. Java, and its lesser cousin, the scripting language JavaScript, make multimedia and interactive capabilities directly available within the browsers that can run Java. Unfortunately, throughout most of 1996, Java has only been available to users of Windows 95 and Windows NT, but not for the still popular Windows 3.1 operating system.

Other new features introduced by Netscape further expand capabilities. The plug-in approach to running videos, playing sound files, and displaying various document formats can make many multimedia files play right within the browser window. Newer versions of the software even come with some multimedia plug-ins and the interactive software program LiveWire preinstalled. This in turn drives the hardware market, as use of such programs as LiveWire requires a sound card, speakers, and microphone. Another hot new technology has been the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and the software that runs it. This attempt to bring virtual reality to the Web seems to be primarily of interest to computer gaming enthusiasts and cutting edge technologists, but it may not be long before more research finds practical uses for the technology.

One other multimedia feature becoming quite common is the use of animated GIFs. The GIF specification has long allowed the inclusion of a sequential series of GIF images. However, it has only been in the past year that the Web browsers began supporting and displaying the animated GIF.

INFORMATION CONTENT

While many of these developments contain more technological wizardry than information value, the actual information content of the Net has expanded as well. Many information rich gopher sites and telnet resources have been transformed and reborn as Web sources. Many new companies, especially small businesses, have established a presence on the Web, offering everything from simple company contact information to detailed databases of products.

One major area of information content development has been in the news and current events arena. Newspapers, from the major nationals to small locals, have put up Web sites ranging in content from an occasional feature story to the full electronic text of the paper. Up-to-the-minute news sources have multiplied and can even be found in a screen saver. PointCast (http://www.pointcast.com/) offers a popular free software product for tracking and customizing news delivery. Its screen saver scrolls current headlines.

A continuing growth sector of online information comes from government sources. The United States government has been making a major move toward publishing government information on the Web. Some federal depository library items are no longer distributed through the depository system, and they are instead available on the Net. At the same time, the government is working on plans for moving even more documents onto the Web or other Internet-accessible means. While the government increases its free dissemination of government-produced resources, some portions of the federal government are grappling with the issue of how to charge for certain sections of the government information universe. The Department of Commerce's STAT-USA (http://www.stat-usa.gov/) is one of the best examples of this experimental approach.

SEARCH ENGINES

The primary area of database development on the Internet has been in the Internet search engines. The majority of the top Internet advertising dollar recipients for 1996 include such search engine favorites as Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo!, and Excite. Significant new contenders entered the field in the past year. For online professionals, the introduction of Alta Vista at the very end of 1995 has been a significant advance over the previously available search engines.

Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/) expands on the benefits first seen partially in the Open Text Index (http://www.opentext.com:8080/). Alta Vista gives the searcher important features, such as field searching, nested Boolean operators, and date limits. Use Alta Vista to see who else links to a specific URL with their link: field or search for copyright violations at sites using your company's logo with a search such as image:ourlogo.gif and not url:our company.com. While Alta Vista (and all the other search engines) still lacks useful features like output sort options and more flexible adjacency operators, Alta Vista is a significant move in the right direction.

HotBot, a product of HotWired and Inktomi, has been another well-publicized addition to the top ranks of Internet search engines. Promising to index the entire Web with frequent updates to the entire database, HotBot has attracted much attention. It is indeed a very large database to search, but do not believe any claim to index the complete Web. While it does pick up a few useful search options, such as limits by date, format, and domain, it still lacks the advanced features of field searching and nested Boolean available from Alta Vista.

Other major contenders have not sat idle during 1996. Infoseek, Lycos, Excite, and Magellan all now offer both large Internet databases to search; and smaller, classified databases of select sites. The Infoseek Guide (http://guide.infoseek.com/) includes Infoseek Select sites. In competition with HotBot, Infoseek introduced Infoseek Ultra, which is intended to be "the next generation in search technology, giving you levels of speed, accuracy, currency, and comprehensiveness unmatched by other search technologies." Lycos (http://www.lycos. com/) now includes a subject section of selected sites derived from the a2z services. Both Excite (http://www.excite.com/) and Magellan (http://www.mckinley.com/) have similar smaller subject-organized databases of reviewed sites in addition to their Web search engines. While these give Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) some competition, Yahoo! seems to remain one of the favorite sites for subject access to the Web.

ONLINE SERVICES

Both the consumer online services and the commercial online services have been looking very closely at the Web and planning major use of the Web for various projects. CompuServe has made the commitment to move entirely to the Web. Knight-Ridder introduced Web-based end-user services in their ScienceBase and BusinessBase products. These and other products, like Questel*Orbit's QPAT*US, demonstrate how commercial online services can begin to move to the Web. Database producers are also looking at the Internet as a means of delivering their product directly rather than only through commercial online services and CD-ROMs.

The Internet has become one more essential tool in the information professional's toolkit. We can continue to educate others on the more complete world of online information that is available beyond the limitations of the freely accessible Internet. At the same time, as the information content of the Internet grows (albeit at a slower pace than the growth rate of the trivial and ephemeral), Internet information resources can be integrated into the reports delivered to users that may combine free Internet sources with commercial information available elsewhere online.

Communications to the author should be addressed to Greg R. Notess, Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, MT 59717-0332; 406/994-6563; greg@notess.com ; http://www.notess.com.