Arena (web browser)

The Arena browser (also known as the Arena WWW Browser) was one of the first web browsers for Unix. Originally begun by Dave Raggett in 1993, development continued at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing. Arena was used in testing the implementations for HTML version 3.0, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and libwww. Arena was widely used and popular at the beginning of the World Wide Web. Arena, which predated Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, featured a number of innovations used later in commercial products. It was the first browser to support background images, tables, text flow around images, and inline mathematical expressions. The Arena browser served as the W3C's testbed browser from 1994 to 1996 when it was succeeded by the Amaya project. Dave Raggett, realizing that there were not enough working hours left for him to succeed at what he felt was an immensely important task, continued writing his browser at home. There he would sit at a large computer that occupied a fair portion of the dining room table, sharing its slightly sticky surface with paper, crayons, Lego bricks and bits of half-eaten cookies left by the children. 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. Raggett subsequently partnered with CERN, to develop Arena further as a proof of concept browser for this work. Using the Arena browser, Dave Raggett, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Håkon Wium Lie and others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions, resizable tables, image backgrounds, HTML math, and other features.