After receiving a bachelor's degree in biological sciences and a secondary education teaching certificate, Kim taught high school science for four years before taking up programming full time. Kim has been working as a developer for eight years and has been at NCSA for four. In June of 1993, shortly before the first alpha release of Mac Mosaic, she joined the project. With the release of the official Mac Mosaic 2.0.0 just around the corner, Kim is busier than ever, but she still found time to talk us briefly about Mosaic and the World Wide Web.
BANKS: Do you know what the user base size is for Mosaic?
KS: Downloads from the NCSA server are running at about a half million as of the end of August. This does not take into account all the people who have downloaded from mirror sites. The Mac downloads are at about 162,000.
BANKS: What Web-related software other than the Mosaic client and HTTP server has NCSA released or plans to release? Does NCSA plan to release secure versions of Mosaic and httpd to support commerce on the Internet?
KS: There will probably be other Web-related software in the future, but I can't say for sure. As for a secure Mosaic, it's part of the plan, but I don't know what the timeline is for it right now.
BANKS: Spyglass and others have licensed Mosaic for commercial redistribution. Do you think having high-quality freely available versions of the software, as you do now, threatens these commercialization efforts?
KS: I personally believe there is a place for both the commercial versions with all the support, bulletproofing, etc., and the free version.
BANKS: With forms and CGI scripts, the Web was transformed into a more interactive medium, in which users could do more than simply "browse". Do you see the future Web as something of an interactive replacement for such unidirectional media as television and newspapers?
KS: Not until the net is more accessible by the average person from a home computer. One of the obvious goals here is make information more readily accessible. This means both the unidirectional reporting of events or information as well as information on demand such as what you'd find in a library situation. As the Web stands currently, information on demand is only marginally available, through things such as CGI scripts and databases. We need to do much more to make searching the whole Web easier, so that a user can enter something like "find all the information on black holes available on the Web."
BANKS: So is NCSA taking steps to make the Web more accessible to users without a lot of technical knowledge -- for example, to people who want to put up a home page but don't want to learn about HTML?
KS: We are trying. We don't currently have plans to write an HTML editor. That is being done in the commercial market. We try to make sure that the FAQ, How To, and other documentation is available to make those tasks as easy as possible.
BANKS: How likely is it that we will see public annotations (in which a single annotation server is used by all Web clients) in the future?
KS: That's an unknown that this time. We've been talking about it for quite some time so it will probably be done some time in the future but there are no guarantees at this point.
BANKS: Do you feel that it is important that the Mac, Windows, and X versions of Mosaic look alike and have the same feature sets, or would you rather see versions that exploit platform-specific features at the expense of some consistency?
KS: Both, really. It's important that features that can be done across all three platforms be done, especially those that would otherwise cause a document not to be visible on another system. For example, if we implement tables on the Mac, tables need to be done on all three. Otherwise those using PCs or X Workstations would be unable to view documents that take advantage of that feature. On the other hand, we should be able to exploit system features that don't inhibit the other two platforms. In fact, we do. A good example of this is the speech recognition capability in the Mac version.
BANKS: So what features can we look forward to in the next Mac Mosaic?
KS: Well, there are a number of user interface improvements coming in the 2.0.0 release. Also, there will be Common Client Interface (CCI) support, which will allow Mac Mosaic to have a two-way communication with other applications.