HTML1 Documents : Authoring & Displaying
Following the ‘Paris’ HML Browser Prototype – a new version of the HTML Document Browser was built using the pure OOPL ‘Eiffel’. The executable was small (at < 200Kbytes), with a simple .ini file for a rich list of user customisation; with a new History feature; and with a facility to embed the document in the .exe file e.g. so that a single file could be shipped with content protected from alteration. The Magic Browser was employed in a variety of projects including for the UK Wine & Spirit Education Trust and a major project for the Asian Development Bank/Government of Pakistan (‘The CLCV Project Browser’].

The Browser Menu
One of the principal aims of the prototyping of information modelling tools (from the ‘GPE’, to the ‘Media Language’, to ‘Paris’ & ‘Magic Browser’, to ‘GARDEN’, to ‘IMPW’ and to the latest prototype ‘Frameworks’ Tool – was simple and small – small menus with a minimal set of buttons to provide for page/model construction and browsing.
The ‘Magic Brower’ Menu shown in this screenshot – shows Buttons for Quit, Query, Home Page, Browsing History, and Paging (Forward, Backward); together with Buttons for Font Size.
Versions were developed to satisfy the basic Hypermedia Page Browsing ideas – and to meet the requirements of test application clients.


At this time – 1994 – HTML was being developed as a Document Authoring & Display Standard – for the World Wide Web – for which the ‘Mosiac Web Browser’ was in development but not yet launched in the public domain. The World Wide Web/HTML/HTTPS was to become available a few years later.
In the meantime, the HTML 1 Standard was employed in the ‘Paris’ and ‘Magic Browser’ Prototypes. Documents – coded in HTML1 – were copied to Floppy Disks and to CDROMs for distribution.
A version of the ‘Magic Browser’ Tool was developed for a Solicitor – where a Legal Document could be distributed as embedded within the Magic Browser executable – and named e.g. SensitiveDocument XYZ.exe – and where the document could be read but the reader had no access to the original which original they could not change etc.

This screenshot shows the “Document History” feature of the Magic Browser – where each document and link – page display – was collected in a “History Document” which could be separately browsed and pages previously selected and displayed, re-displayed.