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Marc H. Brown and Robert A. Shillner
© ACM
When the user clicks on a link on a Web page, a new page appears on
top of the deck, obscuring the page that was previously visible. The
user can leaf through a deck's pages one at a time, jump to the top or
bottom of the deck, or move to any particular page by choosing its
name from a list of the deck's current contents. DeckScape retains all
pages until the user explicitly discards them. For example, consider
a user who starts at page A, then traverses some pages (including B)
and ends at C. If the user then backs up to B and chooses a new link,
DeckScape will insert the new page into the deck just after B, whereas
traditional browsers discard all of the pages after B up to and
including C.
The following screen dump shows DeckScape with three decks:
"Home Deck," "Search Engines," and "Local
Restaurants." The "Home Deck" deck contains 7 pages,
and the 4th page is currently being displayed. In the "Search
Engines" deck, the user split the window horizontally; each pane
can be scrolled independently. The small window in the lower-left is
showing an "away" page from the "Local
Restaurants" deck.
When the following screen dump was taken, the user had issued the "Expand One
Level" command in the deck "Home Pages" while it was displaying the
SRC home page. This command caused DeckScape to traverse each link on
the page and place the resulting documents in a new deck. When this
screen dump was taken, 65 of the 79 links on the home page had already
been followed, and the user had browsed pages in the deck, stopping at
the 22nd page.
[2] Brown, M. H. and Shillner, R. A.
[3] Modula-3 home page.Abstract
This video shows DeckScape, an experimental World-Wide Web browser.
DeckScape uses the metaphor of a deck of playing cards, where each
card is a Web page, and each deck is displayed in its own window. As
the user traverses links, new pages appear on top of the deck. Users
can circulate through the pages in a deck, move and copy pages between
decks, and so on. The primary contributions of DeckScape are
"away" pages and a general-purpose way to organize Web pages
such as hotlists, page expansions, and query results.
Keywords
Interactive user interfaces, information navigation, interaction
techniques, World-Wide Web, Mosaic.
DeckScape
DeckScape [1,2] is an experimental Web browser that centers on the
metaphor of a deck of playing cards, where each card is a Web
page. Each deck is displayed in its own window, with its top page
visible. DeckScape consists of multiple decks, all in a single
top-level window. Users can move, resize, iconify or rename decks,
move or copy pages between decks, start new decks, delete decks or
pages, and so on. The contents of decks persist between invocations of
DeckScape, as an ASCII file containing the URLs of the pages in each
deck.
Decks For Organizing Web Pages
The deck abstraction provides a way for users to organize
material. For example, a user can keep the home pages of all of his or
her colleagues together in a deck named "Colleagues," or
keep several hotlists, each in its own deck. DeckScape provides a deck
named "HotList," and any page can be copied into that deck
with a mouse click.
Decks For Away Pages
DeckScape allows users to drag pages from their home decks and
temporarily display them in separate windows.
When the user clicks on a link in such an "away" page, the
new page appears back on the home deck rather than obscuring the away
page. Thus, the user can have a page, such as a table of contents or
index, visible for an extended period, even while following another
chain of links on the main body of the deck. Because the system is
multi-threaded, users can "click-ahead" on links visible in
any away page.
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Decks For Advanced Commands
DeckScape also uses decks to return the results of certain operations.
For example, there is a global search command that searches all decks
and copies pages with hits into a new deck. The "Expand One
Level" command traverses every link on a particular page, and
returns all resulting pages in a new deck. This "auto-surf"
feature is particularly useful when applied to a page a links returned
by a search engine. Because DeckScape is multi-threaded, the user can
start browsing the contents of the resulting deck before all of the
resulting pages are retrieved.
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Status
DeckScape was initially implemented during the summer of 1994 while
Rob Shillner was an intern at the Systems Research Center. It handles
HTML 2.0, except forms; currently, DeckScape does not support external
views. The system is available as part of the standard Modula-3
release [3].
References
[1] Brown, M. H. and Shillner, R. A.
A New Paradigm for Browsing the Web.
CHI'95 Conference Companion (May 1995) 320-321.
DeckScape: An Experimental Web Browser.
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 27 (1995) 1097-1104.
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/modula-3/html
