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MacWeb
MacWeb was the second Macintosh-based WWW browser to become available. MacWeb is distributed via the Enterprise Integration Network (EINet).
The advantages of MacWeb are that it is fast, has an elegant and easily customizable interface, supports the automatic creation of HTML documents from its hotlists, and indirectly supports the WAIS protocol by launching WAIS client, MacWAIS. One of its biggest drawbacks is its inability to let you select and copy text from the screen. (This is known problem and is being addressed.)
The popup menu
MacWeb pioneered the ability to manipulate hypertext links by clicking on links while holding the mouse button down thus allowing a pop-up menu to appear. The graphic below illustrates this implementation.
The popup menu in MacWeb.
From this menu you can get retrieve the linked item, see information about the linked item, or get the URL of the linked item. The third to last option (Copy URL to Clip) is especially useful for copying URLs and pasting them into email messages without having to retrieve the linked item first.
Stylizing text
MacWeb offers an extraordinary number of options for stylizing how HTML is rendered on your screen. Through the Edit/Styles... menu option you can change the font, style, size, and colors of any HTML tag. The dialog box to make these customization is not quite as easy to understand as hoped, but fortunately it includes an option allowing you to return all your customizations back to their original settings. As a information provider, this feature can prove to be quite useful if you know exactly who your audience is and whether or not they are using MacWeb as their browser. If this is the case, then you can recommend to your audience they configure their Styles menu in a particular way and you can design HTML accordingly. Alternatively, you can distribute your MacWeb Preferences file (found in the Preferences folder of the system folder) to everybody in your organization and rest assured they will be viewing your HTML documents in the manner you designed them. On the other hand, this flies in the face of the advantages of client/server computing.
Unique features
A unique feature of MacWeb is it ability to display more information about remote HTML files and servers than the other browsers reviewed here. This was alluded to in the section describing MacWeb's popup menu. For example, the View MIME Info and View Suffix Info of the popup menu allow you to easily edit and configure what will happen when you select links with specific suffixes as well as whether or not downloaded file will be viewed and with what application. Thus you can directly edit your MIME types table as soon as you discover new documents you want to retrieve.
MacWeb allows you to view the source of an HTML document in any number of ways from the Option/View Source menu. This menu allows you to see the HTML source at it generated by MacWeb, as it is distributed from the remote server, included with the HTTP header that accompanies the source, or only just the header. Generally speaking, the header information is only useful to people who are delving into the heart of HTTP, but it MacWeb's ability to display this information makes the process easier.
Hostlist management
Hotlist management is a straight forward process with MacWeb. When you want to save document's URL to your hotlist you simply select the Hotlist/Add This Document menu option. While you can not create hierarchal hotlists wit MacWeb, you can create multiple hotlist files for different topics. Furthermore, you can export your hotlist files to simple HTML documents allowing you to more easily share your hotlists with others.
Summary
MacWeb is a solid but basic browser. It has been applauded for its adherence to standards. It could best be described as a straight forward browser without a lot of frills.
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Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.