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, 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. At the Web World conference in
Orlando, in early 1995, Raggett demonstrated the different new features of Arena. 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. it saw the implementation of new technologies long before they became mainstream, e.g. CSS. Arena implemented many elements of the HTML3 and HTML3.2 specification including math elements because the developers did not want to distribute the source code until they considered the browser to be stable. In version 0.95, support for inline
JPEG images was added. In version 0.96, support was added for the
FTP,
NNTP, and
Gopher protocols, as well as experimental support for CSS. In Arena 0.98 Dave Beckett added full PNG support.
W3C Beta-1 The W3C published 5 versions of the Arena beta-1 between 27 November 1995 and 8 February 1996 improving
16-bit operating system support and reimplementing CSS (which was still a
Working Draft). To better implement and write CSS, an experimental
style sheet for Arena was developed. On 22 May 1996, the W3C announced that Amaya will replace Arena as their new testbed and that the W3C was looking for a new maintainer because the W3C did not have the resources for two testbeds.
W3C Beta-2 How Arena works: Also, the internal component libwww was updated to version 4. OMRON's Arena supports both
ISO-2022 and
Unicode. It is able to guess the
charset parameter automatically if
charset parameter isn't specified in Content-Type field.
W3C Beta-3 Beta-3a released on 14 August 1996 and Beta-3b released on 16 September 1996 introduced support for the Linux operating systems on
m68k and
DEC Alpha. CSS 1 support was enhanced
Yggdrasil phase On 17 February 1997, the W3C approved Yggdrasil to coordinate future development of Arena. Development was taken over by Yggdrasil, with the idea to turn Arena into an open source
X Window System browser licensed under the
GNU General Public License. Yggdrasil licensed an X
emulator from Pearl Software to port Arena to Windows, Although users would be able to run Arena by
compiling it from the published source code, volunteers created unofficial finished binaries. Yggdrasil had planned to implement browsing features that were already standard in competitive web browsers, Development stopped in late 1998, with the final release being on 25 November 1998. --> The
W3C did not consider demonstration projects to be high priority, and thus, the Arena browser was entirely shut down in favor of outside Linux-community development. ==Features==