Mondo A/S

Mondo A/S was a danish IT company founded in the 1990s and one of the first companies providing web solutions in Denmark.

Early version of Mondo's website ( captured by archive.org on 11 Nov 1996):

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Early years of Mondo

Scope.dk

Since internet access was not widespread in every household in Denmark, a compelling showcase was needed to demonstrate Mondo's capabilities and the types of websites it could deliver to customers. Consequently, the Danish movie review site scope.dk was created very early on.

For its time, scope.dk was quite advanced. During this period, most websites were primarily static, comprising of hand-written HTML pages and images. Scope.dk, however, was built using a CGI program written in C and a custom database to serve dynamic web pages.

$-HTML Programming Language

(A danish developed programming language that no-one have heard about)

The ability to create dynamic websites quickly became a necessity, and in those days, there were no very easy, widely available solutions targeting web development other than CGI/C programs and Perl. Consequently, Mondo developed its own programming language.

$-HTML name originated from the use of the dollar sign character to indicate script blocks. Like other web programming languages of this era, $-HTML script blocks could be embedded in the same files as HTML markup, controlling the output of rendered HTML to the browser. These source files were called mask files and used the file extension .msk.

Microsoft was, of course, also building something similar to $-HTML. Since it was known that percent (%) characters were to be used to indicate script blocks, this was internally referred to at Mondo as %-HTML until it was released as Active Server Pages (ASP).

Code example:

<html>
<head>
<title>$$-HTML examp101.msk</title>
</head>
<body>
$SET(Message, "World")$
Hello $Message$!
</body>
</html>

MondoSearch

In the days before Google, finding information on the web was not as easy as it is today. In Denmark, the largest web portal was the Danish equivalent of Yahoo's link index, Jubii.dk. As websites grew in size, the need for search functionality to help users easily find information became apparent.

To address this need, Mondo built a general-purpose full-text search engine that could be easily integrated into any website, intranet, extranets, etc.

MondoSearch was developed using a combination of C and $-HTML and featured numerous advanced capabilities:

Automatic deduplication of crawled content
Language detection
Document classification (link list, empty page, article)
Automatic detection of site navigation elements
Robot.txt and custom crawling rules
Indexing of sites using HTML frames
Customized ranking
Search page custom branding and styling
... and a lot more

Eventually, MondoSearch was spun off as a separate company, and MondoSoft was established, while Mondo continued as Mondo Solutions, delivering web solutions to customers.

Later years

Mondo Branded Merchandise

Mondo Offices Lyngbyvej

Mondo Offices Bådehavnsgade

MondoSearch, $-HTML, Mondo