AOLpress

~ the obituary ~

NaviSoft was a 1993 company in Goleta, California, with Linda Dozier as its technical head and David Cole running it. In February 1994 it shipped NaviPress, which the manuals described as a browser with an editor built into it, though the more accurate description is that the distinction had not been invented yet. You opened a page. If it was yours, you changed it where it sat and saved it back to the server.

AOL bought the company on 30 November 1994 and renamed everything. NaviServer became AOLserver and the hosting business became PrimeHost. The editor took the longer route: it was GNNpress for a while, after AOL picked up Global Network Navigator, and became AOLpress once the GNN brand was retired. Through all of that it stayed free, which in 1996 was a genuinely aggressive move against a market where Adobe and Microsoft were both charging for the same job.

Version 2.0 arrived in 1997 and was the last one. It was strict about HTML 3.2 in a way nothing else was, quietly correcting markup that browsers would have forgiven, and PC Magazine picked it as one of the best products of 1998 with a line worth keeping: it is not an editor that looks like a browser, it is a browser. Two years later AOL stopped distributing it. There was no shutdown notice, because free software does not get one. AOLserver survived as open source in 1999 and is still maintained under a different name. The editor was not.

Tim Berners-Lee blamed two things, and he was in a position to know, since he had written a browser that edited pages back in 1990 and spent years watching the feature disappear. The first was Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1996, which was free and enormous and could not write. The second was the deal that put Internet Explorer inside AOL's own client. Neither browser had an editor. Once the two default browsers in the world were read-only, the shape of the web was decided.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

The part people who used it still describe first is MiniWeb, a view that drew your site as a map of pages with the links between them shown as lines. You could see the orphan page nothing pointed at. You could rename a file and have the references follow it.

This was 1996 and it was a solved problem, in one free download, four years before anybody used the phrase content management. The reason it feels advanced now is that the capability moved rather than improved. Site structure became something a server computes at request time, which means it is no longer something you can look at while you work.

~ why the browser stopped writing ~

The original design of the web had reading and writing as one motion, and the first browser Berners-Lee wrote in 1990 did both. What killed that was not a technical failure. It was that the free browsers won on distribution, and the free browsers came from companies with no interest in what you might publish.

Netscape wanted your default homepage and Microsoft wanted your operating system to stay relevant. An editor is a support burden, and the sort of person who edits pages is not the sort of person who can be sold to advertisers in volume. Editing became a separate purchase, and once it was a separate purchase it became a professional tool, and once it was a professional tool the ordinary person stopped doing it at all.

~ the next chapter ~

I never had a chance at this one. AOL did not operate in Turkey in any form, and a product distributed through AOL's own site to AOL's own members was outside the map I was on when I came online in 1998. The editor that actually reached my desktop was FrontPage Express, because it came in the box with Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer came with everything.

That substitution is the whole story compressed. My generation of homepage writers learned on the free editor that a browser company bundled as an afterthought, not on the one built by people who thought editing was the point. The web that arrived in Turkey was already the read-only one, and I did not know there had been another version until much later.

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