© 1995 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 17, no. 2, March-April 1995, pp. 30-32.
[Note: only one of these reviews covers Mosaic; the editor thought Mosaic was synonymous with the World Wide Web.]
In the Beginning
Subtitled Accessing & Navigating the Internet’s World Wide Web, Gareth Branwyn’s Mosaic Quick Tour for Mac is a gentle introduction to the most organized portion of the Internet. It doesn’t delve into any of the technical details, nor does it tell you how to get connected to the Internet. Instead, it starts with the assumption that you have a connection, and from there tells you how to get the most from the World Wide Web (WWW).
Created in 1991 by CERN, the Geneva-based European Particle Physics Laboratory, the World Wide Web is more of a diplomatic protocol than a physical entity; computers are part of the Web if their operators have accepted a standardized method of sharing files – nothing else is required. The creators of the standard were interested in making documents on widely separated computers available to researchers who had expertise in something other than computer science. Through HyperText Markup Language (HTML), graphics, text, and links to other computers can all be included within documents. From the user’s point of view, nothing more is required than to open up a document through a Web client (referred to usually as either a Web browser or a Mosaic browser), and click on pictures and text of interest which take them to other pictures or text, which would take them to other pictures or text-an intricate web of interconnected documents located on different computers, often in different countries.
Since the user doesn’t have to know a thing about HTML, or how computers link up to one another, the complexities of cross-platform internetworking vanish behind a pretty, and reasonably quick, interface. Mosaic, the first decent Web browser, became known as the “killer application” of the Internet, the software package capable of bringing the power and promise of the Information Superhighway down to the level of the average user. Available in different flavors for UNIX, Windows and Mac computers, Mosaic’s success was due to its egalitarian democracy as much as technological finesse; on the Web, all computers are created equal. Some are just faster than others.
“It is an ideal introductory book, with a nice glossary, helpful “hot tips,” lots of suggested places to visit on the World Wide Web, good illustrations, and a quick overview of the necessary ‘helper applications’ for viewing specialized files on the Web.”
Mosaic Quick Tour for Mac (and its Windows counterpart) was the first book written on Mosaic, and like all first attempts, some things are missing. About the time the book was printed, Mosaic 2.0 was released, and it supports something new: forms. With forms, not only can you click on highlighted text or graphics to link to something new, you can also now fill in the blanks in a text box to trigger some event. Mosaic Quick Tour has no mention of forms in the index, and the only mention in the body of the book is a brief statement that 2.0 has been released and supports forms – with no explanation of what forms might be.
There is also no mention of Mac Web, a shareware “competitor” to the public domain Mosaic, or of Netscape, the controversial commercial Web browser created by the same programmers that wrote the first versions of Mosaic. These are not flaws, however; all the programs perform basically the same functions, and Mosaic Quick Tour can serve as a guide to any of them.
It is an ideal introductory book, with a nice glossary, helpful “hot tips,” lots of suggested places to visit on the World Wide Web, good illustrations, and a quick overview of the necessary “helper applications” for viewing specialized files on the Web. It rigorously avoids falling into anything beyond what a beginner needs to know; you’ll never be ambushed by leaping from Beginning Internet to Advanced UNIX programming.
It is also cheap, at $12.00, with a decent discount schedule on purchases made direct through Ventana. Those wishing more depth should try Dale Dougherty’s The Mosaic Handbook for the Macintosh, from O’Reilly & Associates, or the book reviewed below. [Note: a second edition of this book may be in print about the time this review is published. The price is going up, to $19.95, but the new edition will include a customized version of Spyglass’ Enhanced Mosaic on diskette.]
Many Begats Later
Internet Roadside Attractions, also by Gareth Branwyn (and six coauthors) is more expensive, far less focused (by designed) and an interesting experiment in interactive publishing. The entire book, with a few minor exceptions, is contained on a CD-ROM packaged with the book. Using Spyglass’ Enhanced Mosaic (also included), you can “read” the book interactively on your computer and, if you have a live Internet connection, branch directly from material stored on the CDROM to material pulled in from the World Wide Web.
In fact, once you accept the conceit that the entire Web is an “extension” of the book, the package makes good sense. Errata and additions to the book are kept on Ventana’s Web server (
Exploring the Internet, as the book’s title states, is the sole purpose of the book. Using the index, recreated on the CD-ROM in HTML, you can skip from topic to topic faster than you can with the paper-based book, and get the same information. For those with color monitors, it can be argued that you actually get more, since· you can see color icons and pictures rather than the black and white reproductions shown in the book. If you have a live Internet connection, the links placed in the text will take you to computers near and far. The metaphor of a travel atlas tends to fall apart at this point; if I point to Seattle on a road map, I’m not immediately transported to Seattle. Point to a link to an interactive tour of Jerusalem, however, and –
Obviously, this volume is of most use to those with a CD-ROM drive and an Internet connection. For those with just a CD-ROM drive, it is still a decent value; you can practice surfing the Net without any unusual cost or equipment. If you don’t have a CD-ROM drive – get one. No Mac owner should be so handicapped.
While the CD-ROM is a great idea, it also is a minor irritation: there is a lot of empty space on the CD-ROM. If you toss in the 3.2 megabyte multimedia commercial for Ventana’s other offerings, the 662K occupied by the Mosaic software, a few megabytes of GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) pictures and the HTML versions of the book’s text, you account for roughly 2.5% of the potential capacity of the CD-ROM. It would have been both nice, and logical, to use the extra space to include some “helper” applications (movie viewers, sound utilities, JPEG graphics viewers) for the type of files commonly found on the World Wide Web.
It also would have been nice to include some sounds, movies, and pictures. The subtitle of the book is Sites, Sounds & Scenes Along the Information Superhighway. Would it be too much to ask to include a few of each, especially for those not yet connected, and not sure if they really want to be?
Too little attention is spent on configuring Mosaic. There are help files included on the CD-ROM, but I could find links to only one of these; the rest were orphans and had to be loaded directly. This is an easy task for Web veterans, but they probably don’t need the help. Those that do need help are out of luck.
Having a few megabytes of HTML documents also presents wonderful opportunities for learning HTML scripting, but there is no mention of this in the book. If you click on a couple HTML links in the index, you are offered a hot-link to computers in Illinois or Switzerland – if you have an active Internet connection. If you don’t, you are stuck, unless you stumble on Mosaic’s View Source option (not mentioned in the book, but it is mentioned in the orphaned help text).
Despite the irritations and lapses, on the whole, the book is not only worth the price, but far more fun than most computer books.
Silly Stuff
Both books engage in the now common practice of sticking blank “Note” pages and advertising at the back of the volume. I have two objections to this: 1) I don’t want to buy someone’s advertising, and 2) the last pages of a book should be reserved for the index.
Mosaic Quick Tour has eleven unnecessary pages separating the back cover from the index. I can accept a few pages of junk at the back of a Tom Clancy novel; novels don’t need indices. But I don’t appreciate playing “hide and seek” with an index in a non-fiction work.
Internet Roadside Attractions has more than twice the fluff- 23 pages of advertising and blank “Notes” pages. In this case, however, I don’t care; since the index is included on the CD-ROM, !just tossed the book and used the index on the CD-ROM.
Technology triumphs over a publishing industry scourge.
Gareth Branwyn, Mosaic Quick Tour for Mac. Ventana: 1994. xvii, 184 pp. $12.00. ISBN 1- 56604-195-3
Gareth Branwyn et. al., Internet Roadside Attractions. Ventana: 1995. xxxiv, 320 pp. $29.95 (includes Macintosh and Windows-compatible OD-ROM). ISBN 1-56604-193-7.
Ventana Press has an aggressive user group discount program for orders placed direct. For information call Ventana at 1- 800-743-5369