Web walker: Scape-oriented Web browsing

Conventionally, Web pages have been recognized as documents described by HTML. Image data, such as photographs, logos, maps, illustrations, and decorated text, have been treated as sub-components of Web documents. However, we can alternatively recognize all Web pages as images on the screen. In this paper, we use the term Web image to mean the result of rendering given HTML data. When a Web page is treated as a Web image, its HTML data is considered to be metadata which describes the Web image content. Taking such a viewpoint, we propose a new image-based hypermedia which we call continuous web. In our model, there is no distinction between Web images and other images such as photographs. Therefore, we have designed a new data element, the areal-hyperlink, for connecting various images on the Web. We refer to all images that have areal-hyperlinks as hyperimages. Regarding everything on the Web as images leads us to consider a new style of browsing and navigating. We use the term scape-oriented browsing. We define a scape as a collection of continuously accumulated images. For example, whenever we walk in the real world, we can perceive and remember various forms of information through a scape process. Here, we describe new methods for scape-oriented browsing, such as see-through anchors, parallel navigation, and peripheral scape presentation. We have designed and implemented a prototype system based on our model. Our system offers continuous browsing and navigation to users. We explain our concepts and discuss the effectiveness and potential of this approach.