WWW95: DeckScape, an experimental Web browser

abstract

this paper describes DeckScape, an experimental World Wide Web browser based on a "deck" metaphor. a deck consists of a collection of Web pages, and multiple decks may exist on the screen at once. as the user traverses links, new pages appear on top of the current deck.

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my comment

marc brown from the Corporate Research at Digital Equipment Corporation presented with DeckScape a new way to lock at the Web.

DeckScape presents all documents that were visited as decks. each time the user follows a link, the new document is added on top of the current deck. documents may be added or removed from a deck or they may be moved or copied to another deck. also a single page can be pulled out of the deck, so it is always visible. this is especially helpful if such a page contains a lot of references to other documents. another very useful feature is the capability to follow ALL links from one document at once. the result is a new deck with all documents that are linked to the "source page". since DeckScape is multithreaded, there is no waiting while documents are retrieved and multiple links might be followed at one time.

i like this approach very much. unfortunately DeckScape is still in an experimental and quite incomplete state; it does not display inline images nor is it capable to spawn external viewers. due to this restrictions, DeckScape is of limited use in the daily business.

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