Background news analysis

HTML: Bright Star In Netscape's Constellation Stellar GUI What exactly is Constellation? Constellation looks more like a build-on to the Communicator browser/ app product than the browser's replacement. It gives users a flexible HTML-based GUI with a single set of rules for handling most applications. Constellation supports a customizable push/pull technology that lets users decide how often they want news, notifications or other reports popping up on their desktops and how big those pop-ups should be. Constellation is slated eventually to support Apple Computer's 3-D Web mapping format, though Netscape may also create its own tool to compete with Apple's HotSauce. The GUI lets users create multiple d esktops for the different hats they wear. This "workspace," which Netscape calls the HomePort, can function under any of the operating systems Communicator supports. Jerry Michalski, managing editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter, says the fact that both Netscape and Microsoft are creating multiapplication HTML interfaces will benefit users because "the environment will be extremely customizable and more powerful than what we have today." Netscape's interface supports three types of push/pull technology: one based on e-mail, one on Web-site downloads and one on Marimba's Castanet Tuner technology. One e-mail approach, announced last August, is known as In-Box Direct. Fifty content providers, including The New York Times, use In-Box Direct to deliver rich HTML information to four million subscriber e-mail inboxes. E-Mail can be used to deliver corporate notifications (with properties like expiration time) to a preassigned place on user desktops. Notifications could also be used to tell a program, like Intui t's Quicken, to update information based on notification that a check has cleared. Netscape's second push/pull effort will let Constellation users automatically pull down a particular Web site on a predetermined schedule. One iteration o f this capability, called LiveSites, could be used to download specific sites (including the user desktop) while the user sleeps. On an intranet, LiveSites might include updated multimedia presentations, price lists or analyses. McCue expected by this month to provide a simple user guide based on HTML tags and Java scripts to convert Web pages to LiveSites. InfoBlocks at the bottom of the new Constellation GUI can pull down whole Web pages at specific intervals or page parts (pagelets) based on CGI scripts. Finally, Constellation will tap into Marimba's Java-based Castanet Tuner technology for broadcasting content. McCue predicts that the three push/pull technologies will eventually blur. Critical push/pull issues that must still be resolved, however, are managing bandwidth usage and ensuring that unsupervised downloads don't overload the memory limitations of a machine. Aligning the Stars Netscape clearly sees NCs and consumer devices as an important market for Constellation--not surprising, considering Netscape's Navio NC spin-off. "You might have an NC at an airport that lets you log onto your HomePort or at a hotel where you can log on," says McCue. Whether older equipment can be preserved and fashioned into the NC metaphor remains to be seen. Michalski says that while Constellation could stunt the growth of ActiveX and Windows NT by reenabling older machines, it's not yet clear how well Java or multimedia applications will perform on a 386. "The good news is that a lot of what Netscape is doing is using very basic HTML and dynamically generated documents that don't require a lot of resources on the client," he says. How Netscape fares against its primary client competitor, Microsoft, may depend on something as primal to the network as e-mail fun ctionality. Several analysts contend that the user choice is between the functionality of products like Microsoft Exchange and the openness of e-mail on Communicator. Michalski contends that Microsoft's commitment to Exchange and Office will prove a "long-term weakness." What open-standards-based mail does, he says, is blur the distinction between an e-mail message and other content, such as a presentations. "You can build all of them from the same HTML toys," he says, "and once you do that, the way you look at sending, publishing and presenting changes quite dramatically--and your tool suite simplifies dramatically."

The H-Report News, Trends and Analysis by Rivka Tadjer Internet Domain Wars by Christy Hudgins-Bonafield Updated April 8, 1997