Documents and Manuals menus in Mosaic going away

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 02:06:46 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9307260706.AA06103@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: mosaicdev@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Documents and Manuals menus in Mosaic going away
X-Md4-Signature: 57fe150284807188e1d7ceb143881f17
Status: RO
I'm strongly considering stripping out the Documents and Manuals menus
of Mosaic for 2.0, and replacing them with hypermedia equivalents on
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu:80 and referenced from the Mosaic home page.  Why?

(a) As the information falls out of date or is expanded the interface
    wouldn't need to be updated, just the documents, and old Mosaic
    versions would continue to work.
(b) Those menus were largely put in there as part of Mosaic's proof of
    concept stage, so network pros and others who walk up to Mosaic
    for the first time not knowing what it can do will see interesting
    and useful things.  This is less useful now that it's established
    and has a broad and expanding user base, as many users are simply
    confused by many of the entries (what's X.500?  what does "News
    Interface" mean and why can't I get all those groups?)
(c) They are definitely confusing and misleading for people without
    pure Internet access.
(d) The various Manual servers may or may not be strictly legal, and
    it'd make me feel better if they were out of the interface proper.
(e) Many requests have come in for configuration functionality.  I'd
    rather discourage that, and rather encourage people to generate
    hypermedia documents instead -- better for them for some of the
    reasons being listed here, aids use of different browsers and
    avoids dependence on Mosaic, and more likely to help grow the Web.
(f) Some requests have come in to simplify the interface, particularly
    wrt those two menus, for people who want to present a simple
    information browsing environment to people for straightforward
    purposes (e.g., tour our library).
(g) Quite a few requests come in for additions to the "Other Home
    Pages" menu, and I feel guilty turning them down but don't want to
    bloat the menu beyond just a few; I'd rather leave new server
    tracking, etc. to the central index of Web servers at CERN +
    Mosaic What's New + demo document, so I'd like to get rid of that
    submenu altogether.

The Help menu, of course, will stay.

Feedback straight to me, please.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu