On Sunday 27 July 2003 00:21, Peter Kelly wrote:
> Actually if you're looking for usability ideas like this to implement,
> probably the most innovative thing I've seen like this is Pad++. This is
> a web browser which displays the set of visited pages in a graph
> structure that the user can navigate around.
>
> Each node in the graph represents an individual page, and as you navigate
> to other pages, additional nodes are added to the graph with lines
> connecting the source & destination of links. You can then see a
> zoomed-out view of your browsing history. This is IMHO a far better
> alternative to the traditional back/forward model since you can see
> multiple "branches" of your navigation path, along with thumbnails of
> each of the pages you have visited.
>
> I had a go at putting together a very rough prototype of this in konq at
> one stage but didn't get the time to take it any further. The biggest
> question is really how to integrate this into the user interface cleanly,
> and sorting out how to deal with issues like multiple windows etc.
>
> Have a look at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/ for more details,
> particularly the paper "A Zooming Web Browser" at
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/papers/spie-96-webbrowser/spie-96-webbrows
>er.pdf
>
> There's a ton of other ideas like this out there in the research community
> that makes today's web browsers look very primitive and unsophisticated.
> Some of these have a lot of potential if they can be implemented properly
> in maintream browsers.

This sounds interesting!  

In the near-term, some of the features outlined in the review still might be 
excellent incremental improvements that one could get at a very low cost.  
One that comes to mind is the thumbnail image of the page.  I know Konq 
already does this when previewing HTML files, so it seems like it should be 
fairly inexpensive.

Cheers,

Mike