What Was The First Web Browser Developed Called?

The first web browser was called Silversmith. It was developed by John Bottoms in 1987. This browser was based on SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) tags. In fact, it used a set of tags that it had borrowed from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP. It made a few changes to the tags used originally by the AAP while preparing their Electronic Document Project and sold this new version to some parties that were initially interested in this new concept. At that time, SGML was used mainly for the formatting of printed documents. It was but natural for people to initially resist the use of SGML to display documents onto an electronic medium.

Silversmith was organised in its approach, including advanced features like integrated indexers, full-text searches, hypertext links, better quality images, sounds and text using SGML tags (as instructions) and a return stack to be used with hypertext links. It was ahead of its times, as most of today's so-called 'advanced' browsers still do not have some of these features, including the ability to restrict searches with the structure of a document, the use of wild cards to search for indexed documents, and the ability to search the names and values assigned to each attribute using the tags.

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