Libwww

Libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API written in C for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API.

It can be used for both large and small applications including: browsers/editors, robots and batch tools. There are pluggable modules provided with Libwww which include complete HTTP/1.1 with caching, pipelining, POST, Digest Authentication, deflate, etc.

The purpose of libwww is to serve as a testbed for protocol experiments.

Tim Berners-Lee created Libwww in November 1992 in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web. Applications such as the widely-used command-line text browser Lynx (web browser) and the Mosaic web browser use Libwww.

Libwww is free software, distributed under the W3C Software Notice and License. Being free software means that recipients have access to the source code and are free to examine, copy, modify, and redistribute the software, thus ensuring the continued evolution to more useful applications.

Important Applications

Historical

*WWW - The Libwww Line Mode Browser. In 1992, "telnet info.cern.ch" was a public-access telnet client. [Krol, Ed, The Whole Internet Catalog User's Guide & Catalog, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1992, Third Printing, February 1993, p. 227.]

Contemporary

References

External links

* [http://www.w3.org/Library/ Libwww]
* [http://www.w3.org/Library/Collaborators.html Libwww hackers]