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Business
Experience the Web metamorphosis
LIKE ANY technology Web also has a history of its own. We will start this week's column with a discussion on a Net service that enables us to understand and experience the technological evolution of the Web
Web history
Many people like to listen to old music, watch old movies and read about old times. Apart from the quality of the subjects handled and simplicity of the treatment, one of the major reasons that pulls people to the old creative works is their ability to take them back to the past. Apart from the nostalgic experience, they also give us more insights into the values and life-situations that prevailed during the time in which the works were conceived. The Web is no exception to this general rule and going back to the old times of the Web should help us gain an understanding about the evolution of this technology. Now, we will examine some of the features of a Web service `Deja vu' that is devoted to the history of the Web.
Deja vu
Though the Web is not an old phenomenon — if you use the calendar year to measure its age — many dramatic technological changes have taken place in the Web world. The memories of browsing with the non-graphical, command-line mode browser Lynx still lingers in my mind. It is not easy now to browse your site through a command line browser or through an old version of your favourite browser. Of course old browsers are still available on the Net as free downloads. But going through the laborious process of downloading and installing an old browser just to get an experience of what was the state of Web a few years back may not seem to be a worthwhile task.
The `History of the Web' service provided by the Deja vu — available at: http://www.dejavu.org/ — helps you fulfil this wish without much effort. If you want to browse with an old version of IE or Netscape or Lynx or Mosaic, visit the page of the service and access the `emulator' option. The emulation feature presents you with a list of old browsers from which you can select the one of your choice. Once a choice is made, the service will immediately display a browser window with an interface that is similar to the old browser that has been selected. This emulated browser will behave like the old browser and this way you will get a reasonably good understanding of the features and limitations of old browsers.
Another highlight of the service is the `timeline' feature that enables us read about the various past events that shaped the Web. Here you can have a quick overview of how the various Net services evolved. Anybody who wants to study the vicissitudes that took place in this lively medium, should read this.
If you want to go a little deep into the Web technology history and the personalities who made significant contributions to the development of Web try the link: http://www.w3.org/People.html and http://www.w3.org/History.html
Nerdybooks: software tips newsletter
Whatever your views on Microsoft and its attempt to corner the computing market, we cannot deny the fact that majority of computer users make extensive use of its packages like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, IE and the like. Though Microsoft's powerful marketing engine may be one of the reasons for the popularity of these packages, there are other reasons as well. Most of the packages have got many features that are quite useful and tuned to the requirements of various categories of people and most of these features can be used by anybody without prior computing experience. Though many tools of these packages can be deployed without much effort, there can be more efficient ways of doing things and there can also be many program features that are unearthed by ordinary users. This author regularly gets many letters seeking tips related to these packages, which show that there exist many people who don't have enough time or lack the proper skills to explore the many features that lie hidden in these products. If you also belong to this category, here is an interesting newsletter service that dispatches software tips everyday into your e-mail box. The tip-of-the-day newsletter contains tips related to various Microsoft products that include Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Windows Me. If interested, try out this link: http://www.nerdybooks.com/
Chipboard extender
In one's digital life the most heavily used feature while editing a text is the cut and paste. A programmer, while writing a program, uses this feature to prevent repeated typing of similar statements; a writer typing in an article needs to use this feature for several requirements to re-arrange the text, to insert some data/picture stored at some other source and the like. In fact, it is almost impossible to think about a computing life devoid of this valuable feature. But the cut-paste feature provided by the Windows has one major deficiency — at a time you can use only one copy. If you copy a sentence and transfer it into the clipboard, you can paste this text any number of times, but when you copy another block of text, the former clipboard content gets erased. This means that if you need the first block of text to be pasted again, you need to go back to the original document and copy it into the clipboard. The problem becomes more acute if you need to cut and paste from several documents. Don't you think that we need a program that can store, organise all the copied materials in a particular location and allow us to retrieve any of these text blocks at any time from the stored database? If you feel the need for a clipboard extender with many of the features discussed above, the program `Yankee Clipper' would certainly make your digital life more productive. After installing the program — available at: http://www.yankee-clipper.net/index.htm — and keeping it live in your machine, whenever you copy a block of text — a URL, a picture or any other content — the software automatically stores the content, organises it and presents you a proper interface that lets you retrieve any of the copied content at any time without any effort.
J. Murali
(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)
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