When Mosaic was released in early 1993, the growth of the World Wide Web exploded. Now, a technology in development at Sun Microsystems promises to kick in the turbocharger.
Sun's soon-to-be-released Web browser, code named WebRunner, removes the code for standard features such as http (hypertext transfer protocol, the communications language of the Web) and HTML (hypertext markup language, the display language of the Web) built into other browsers. Based on Sun's failed First Person operating system, WebRunner implements a "plug-in" architecture similar to Photoshop. Plug-ins can be downloaded on the fly as needed: to add a feature like animation to your site, just write a plug-in and stick it on your Web server.
To get to this point, Sun has written a C++ derivative language called Java. All code is written in Java, so there are no tricky cross-platform issues during plug-in development.
WebRunner has the potential to push Web feature development down to the front lines - the content creators. Kai Krause, are you listening? - Anders Lund
ELECTRIC WORD
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A Better Way to Weave the Web
