2.2 Network-Enabled Web Authoring Tools

Between 1995 and 1998 developers began to build networking capabilities into Web authoring tools. This trend was driven by a few common factors.

2.2.1 Networking Changes

During this time, network access began to change. Companies started bringing Internet access to employee desktops. Universities had long had Internet access (yes, even before the Web), but the way the Internet was accessed on campuses changed. No longer was the Internet tied mostly to Unix servers and Unix clients: Microsoft embraced the Internet and in 1995 brought out Windows-based Web servers and clients, extending the set of tools already available to Windows users. Macintosh users gained access to Web tools in a similar timeframe. With increased network access and the growth of the Web as an industry, it became possible to consider Web-specific remote authoring capabilities.

The growth of the Web and of Internet access made it difficult to continue with Telnet, FTP, and NFS. Authors of Web sites increasingly used Windows, not Unix. Telnet tools existed for Windows and Macintosh, but users had to go out of their way to install and learn to use Telnet. NFS support was rare on Windows and Macintosh desktops. FTP was the only viable upload tool, and then only if the Web server had FTP. Although it sounds odd to Unix users, in 1995 some Windows Web servers did not support FTP at all.

2.2.2 Growth in Team Sizes

The economic importance of the Web soon meant that sites were no longer authored by a programmer or two but by teams of specialized experts. Coordinating the efforts of a medium-sized team with only FTP to update the Web site was challenging.

For example, in 1996 I worked on a Microsoft Web development team building a technology showcase site. The team of 14 included four Web development engineers who wrote HTML and scripting code, three graphical designers, two text writers/editors, a producer, two program managers, a tester, and a team manager, all using Windows, of course. Most of these contributors never learned to use Telnet, FTP, or any of the command-line tools so familiar to Unix users at the time. The team employed many authoring and image manipulation tools, everything from Windows Notepad to Adobe Photoshop.

None of the tools used by this Web site team worked together or had remote authoring capability. The Web site was produced in stages: Contributors saved their work locally and then copied the files manually (with Windows network file sharing) to the correct location on a staging server. This step often resulted in mistakes such as misnaming files, forgetting to copy or create files, putting files in the wrong directories, or overwriting or deleting the wrong files. On the staging server, some testing was done before the whole site was copied to a production server, but it was difficult to coordinate changes on the staging server. I recall bitter arguments between developers when they accidentally (or as was alleged, intentionally) overwrote each other's work and lost updates.

2.2.3 Early Networked Tools

Only a few tools supported remote authoring in 1996. All of them did remote authoring based on HTTP, but each client tool could only talk to the corresponding server because all the HTTP extensions were different.

• FrontPage, acquired by Microsoft through its purchase of Vermeer in January 1996, interoperated with a Web server running FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE).

• AOLPress, formerly GNNPress and NaviPress, could author on AOLServer (formerly GNNServer and NaviServer).

• Netscape Composer could author on Netscape Enterprise Server.

• W3C's Amaya browser used W3C's Jigsaw server.

2.2.4 Connected, But Not Interoperable

Although these solutions had much in common, they did not interoperate or even provide the same features or use the same data model. Each used a proprietary protocol (FPSE, AOLServer Extensions, Netscape Extensions) or an open but insufficiently powerful standard protocol (HTTP, FTP) with nonstandard extensions. For a time, the divisions were strictly along product lines; no two Web servers from different software companies supported the same protocol mechanisms for authoring. Then an FPSE module for Apache made it possible for Windows FrontPage clients to do remote authoring on Unix-based servers for the first time [FrontPage03]. However, most client implementors were reluctant to support the Microsoft-controlled FrontPage protocol, so these client applications were still not supported by a FrontPage site.

By 1996 most vendors of image-processing, Web publishing, and office document applications were considering adding Web authoring capabilities to their products. Some of these products were used as part of the Web site design process, and others were being used to share documents in a corporate office setting (where the Web was used even for intranet-only sites because it could be accessed from any operating system). However, without a standard, it was difficult to choose an approach or figure out how to interoperate with various Web servers.