SRC Technical Note 1997-010

Focus+Context Displays of Web Pages: Implementation Alternatives

Marc H. Brown, Hannes Marais, Marc A. Najork, William E. Weihl

This paper describes an outline processor display of Web pages. We attach icons, called zippers, to the HTML heading tags (H1, H2, ...), and the user can dynamically include or elide the body of each section by clicking on the zipper. We have implemented zippers in three different ways: zippers that are inserted by a custom-built Web browser and that control the browser's display engine; zippers that are inserted into the HTML document by a Web proxy and that use the proxy to generate modified HTML reflecting the changed state of the zipper; and zippers that trigger a JavaScript program which redisplays an appropriately modified version of the page.

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