Still talking about the frogans address. In the post down below I was talking about how frogans addresses can indicate frogans families, and the implications of such when browsing: If a frogans being visited has family members on the net, the end-user can open them up directly from that frogans’ contextual menu (right-click, or ctrl-click on a Mac).

The frogans address simplifies browsing in another way that I haven’t yet talked about. It simplifies your browsing history.

When surfing about on the Web your browser caches the URL of every page you’ve recently been on so that you can trace your steps under the History menu. We’ve all been there: Depending on your activity, a week’s worth of URLs can be a big messy list. I wonder how often people just skim that menu for any page on the site that they’re looking for, and then navigate from there? “Fairly often” says I, and if you think I’m way off mark, leave a comment (anybody?).

Browsing back by frogans addresses (a pleasure that, alas, can only be done in the frogansphere) involves less rummaging. Every frogans you visit opens up on its home slide. Addresses for other slides within a same frogans do not exist.

“WHAT? I can’t type in the exact slide that I want to see without going through the navigation?” Relax, and think about some of the things you get back in the trade-off:

• Frogans addresses maintain a nice and concise format. No crazy long URLS with subdirectories and unintelligible variables in the frogansphere.
• Tracing back your steps won’t make you dizzy.

The Frogans Player contextual menu contains a list of your recently visited frogans, which is in effect a list of recently looked-up frogans addresses. Since a frogans address refers to an entire frogans as a whole, and not to individual slides, this list is going to be much quicker and cleaner than what you’d expect in a Web browser.

I’m not saying that the history menu in Web browsers is for the birds. Web pages often contain amounts of information that wouldn’t be appropriate in the smaller frogans format, so it makes more sense on the Web to be able to find an individual page without considering its context within a site.

That the frogans address refers to the entire frogans should help remind frogans publishers of the importance of the context of each frogans slide within a frogans. This in turn should boost the functionality of browsing frogans backwards and the frogansphere in general through encouraging cohesiveness of content in frogans overall.

There may be those who will be quick to believe that a frogans address is little more than a dressed-up URL, that it exists merely as a mechanism for financing Frogans Technology development and the MFN (Main Frogans Network). Hogwash, I tell you. Dare I suggest that with frogans addressing we’re witnessing yet another step up the IT evolutionary ladder?

While ultimately frogans FSDL documents and other resources that make up frogans are transferred by HTTP, as Web pages are, the implementation of the frogans address as intermediary adds a layer of usability for the end-user and convenience for the publisher, leading to all-around functionality for everybody.

For end-users, they access frogans using a format of addressing that is really simple (ex: “frogans*example“, or “frogans*example.extension“). If only the Web were so easy. Ever copy and paste a URL only to have left out the “h” in “http://”? Or you’ve typed two “w”s instead of three? Or how about trying to recite a complete URL over the phone, and finally saying “Oh, I’ll send you an email…”

For frogans publishers the convenience of the frogans address is in its flexibility. The address of a frogans is independent from where on the Internet its resource files are physically located. A frogans address stays the same regardless of where its frogans is hosted, at what IP address or domain name, or in which directory. That information is instead kept in the registrant’s frogans address settings, and can be updated at any moment – and without the kind of delay that you get when, say, you want to redirect your domain name.

If a publisher of frogans so chooses, they can group frogans together in the frogans’ contextual menu by their addresses. This is done by giving different frogans a common “frogans family name” in their frogans address, and differentiating them with personalized extensions.

Remember way back when, two paragraphs ago, when I gave as an example “frogans*example.extension“? Here “example” is a frogans family name. “extension” is its extension (duh). The person who has registered “frogans*example” or “frogans*example.extension” has the exclusive right to use “example” as a family name in as many other frogans addresses as they like, each having its own extension:

• frogans*example.butterflies
• frogans*example.fish
• frogans*example.nets
• …

When you visit a frogans, the Frogans Player will detect the addresses of other frogans sharing the same family name and display them in the contextual menu of the frogans being visited. This is useful for associating different frogans thematically, particularly if it is desirable to quickly have a several different frogans family members on-screen simultaneously.

Don’t confuse the extension with a subdirectory. They have nothing in common. The frogans address extension denotes a unique frogans address for an entirely unique frogans. Different frogans in the same frogans family don’t even have to have the same hosting, for instance. Hop away, little frogans. Be freeee!

My inaugural post last May was entitled “Frogans Player beta expected soon“. It’s been but the blink of an eye since then, in geological terms. Can I see a show of hands of all the geologists out there reading this? Anybody…?

The Frogans Player is still under development. A great deal has already been accomplished, but for a beta to be ready it will take a few more weeks (that you can count on your fingers, not on your toes). Take it as an indication of the strength of STG Interactive’s commitment to the development of Frogans Technology.

The principal behind Frogans Technology demands not only perfect cohesion between its three pillars, these being the Frogans Player, FSDL and FNSL, but that this cohesion applies to users on each of the current three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (x86). A frogans must look and behave the same on Linux as it does on Windows, as it does on a Mac, as it does on Linux. Without a glitch.

A very strong effort is being made to insure the functioning and compatibility of the Linux release of the Frogans Player. As rapid, robust and reliable as it must be on other operating systems, the Frogans Player for Linux must also be capable of adapting to the various system configurations and settings available to Linux users.

Running under Linux the Frogans Player must, among other things, be able to work with:

• different window environments, such as GNOME and KDE
• activation and deactivation of compositing window managers (for full alpha channel support)
• multiple display monitors
• differing system configurations during installation (personal, global and temporary installations)

The officially targeted Linux distributions for the Frogans Player will be Debian 4.0 (April 2007), Ubuntu 7.04 (April 2007), OpenSuse 10.2 (December 2006), Fedora Core 7 (March 2007) and Mandriva 2007.1 (April 2007).

STG Interactive will also test the Frogans Player under previous versions of theses distributions released since 2005 and will post whatever issues that we might come across in the release notes.

Since we’re eager to broaden the range of Linux configurations with which the Frogans Player will work, testing and feedback from users of all Linux configurations are welcome. If you’d like to test a pre-release of the Frogans Player for Linux, please contact me.