Arena: W3C's HTML3 browser

Authors

Dave Raggett, Håkon W Lie, Henrik Frystyk, Yves Lafon

Status

Prerelease beta-3 has been released. (The previous versions beta-2, beta-1 and 0.98 are still available in binary form.) It supports elements of HTML3, including tables, math and experimental style sheets. There are bugs and shortcomings, so be sure to set you expectations accordingly.

Background

Dave Raggett first implemented a browser to render documents conforming to the HTML+ specifications which he worked on. HTML+ is now known as HTML3, and Arena's primary purpose is still to be a testbed for HTML3 documents. From July 94, Håkon W Lie of CERN worked with Dave to extend Arena in several directions. First, it was modified to take advantage of the library of common code, now known as the W3C Reference Library. Also, Arena was ported to all major unix platforms and made available on the net. Henrik Frystyk Nielsen was responsible for the library while at CERN and has continued this work for W3C at MIT. From release 0.96, Arena has included experimental support for Cascading Style Sheet, and Håkon Lie continues this work for W3C at INRIA/Sophia Antipolis. Yves Lafon has joined the team and is completing support for forms and style sheets. We're grateful to many external collaborators.

Plans

Arena will continue to be a testbed browser for HTML3 and style sheets. We do not have the resources nor the intent to make Arena a full-featured web browser, but welcome initiatives to help add fuctionality.

Precompiled Binaries

Binaries are available for linux, sun (solaris and sunos), dec and sgi.

Source code

The source code of Arena is now available under the standard W3C copyright.

Documentation

See list of frequently answered questions.