From what I was reading Encarta has similarities with the current HTML standards, what if Microsoft was able to implement it (this is what they planned on Cairo but failed to deliver) and put it on the internet as they have planned it, would this Microsoft 'HTML' rival merge with HTML like what happened to Flash or not.
WI: Microsoft Invents something similar to html
- Thread starter kasumigenx
- Start date
marathag
Banned
From the wiki
Microsoft originally released Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 in two packages: at retail in Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and via the simultaneous OEM release of Windows 95. Version 1.5 was released several months later for Windows NT, with support for basic table rendering, an important early web standard. Version 2.0 was released for both Windows 95 and Windows NT in November 1995, featuring support for SSL, cookies, VRML, and Internet newsgroups. Version 2.0 was also released for the Macintosh and Windows 3.1 in April 1996. Version 2 was also included in Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit for Windows 95 in early 1996, which retailed for 19.99 USD and included a how-to book and 30 days of Internet access on MSN among other features.[2]
Internet Explorer 3.0 was released free of charge in August 1996 by bundling it with Windows 95, another OEM release. Microsoft thus made no direct revenues on IE and was liable to pay Spyglass only the minimum quarterly fee. In 1997, Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit, in response to which Microsoft settled for 8 million USD.[4] Version 3 included Internet Mail and News 1.0 and the Windows Address Book. It also brought the browser much closer to the bar that had been set by Netscape, including the support of Netscape's plugins technology (NPAPI), ActiveX, frames, and a reverse-engineered version of JavaScript named JScript. Later, Microsoft NetMeeting and Windows Media Player were integrated into the product and thus helper applications became not as necessary as they once were. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were also introduced with version 3 of Internet Explorer.
So with the 'Browser Wars' with Netscape, 'Encarta for WWW' Markup Language or whatever MS would call it would become a larger part of the Web, and those extensions/handles would be rolled into a later versions, like XML was
Actually, Microsoft planned it even before the WWW was released and turned vaporware later on in the mid 90s, the same thing happened with the Phone ideas that they planned recently..when more similar phones similar to their planned phones appeared.
From what I remember the Encarta engine was similar to Hypercard, Director, other early hypertext/multimedia authoring systems. HTML took off because it was portable, simple, no-one owned it, and it was similar enough to SGML that academics could grasp it. Microsoft was famously slow to embrace the internet so a push for a Microsoft standard hypertext markup language would have been out of character, and even if they had tried I doubt it would have taken off - they later tried to bend HTML to their will and failed.
In fact according to this helpful Quora answer it seems that Encarta's text was written with SGML, so unless Microsoft tried to gather support to replace HTML with SGML they would have found it hard to displace the simpler system, and given that SGML is an ISO standard they would still have had to gradually turn it into Microsoft-specific SGML, and get everybody else to follow them. Given that so much of the internet was and remains built on Linux / Unix / Apache etc I can't see it working.
I first got on the internet in 1995, when I was at university - I was part of the September after the September that never ended - but such was the speed of development at the time that I was way behind the curve. There's a good little article here that gets across the sheer speed with which the world wide web went from being an academic exercise to Pets.com. Microsoft wasn't exactly IBM but even so it all happened too quickly for a company that size to react.
In fact according to this helpful Quora answer it seems that Encarta's text was written with SGML, so unless Microsoft tried to gather support to replace HTML with SGML they would have found it hard to displace the simpler system, and given that SGML is an ISO standard they would still have had to gradually turn it into Microsoft-specific SGML, and get everybody else to follow them. Given that so much of the internet was and remains built on Linux / Unix / Apache etc I can't see it working.
I first got on the internet in 1995, when I was at university - I was part of the September after the September that never ended - but such was the speed of development at the time that I was way behind the curve. There's a good little article here that gets across the sheer speed with which the world wide web went from being an academic exercise to Pets.com. Microsoft wasn't exactly IBM but even so it all happened too quickly for a company that size to react.
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Perhaps Microsoft saw that someone else is implementing the same idea as their Vaporware Internet side of Cairo so they cancelled it silently like they did to Courier/Andromeda.