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can also open and close levels of the table of contents, but the body of a section is always displayed <strong>in</strong> the second panel.<br />

A multi-panel display such as Superbook could be implemented us<strong>in</strong>g Netscape's frames, by add<strong>in</strong>g appropriate HTML<br />

markups and Java code to a source document.<br />

Another related system is SoftQuad's Panorama Pro [6], which displays SGML documents us<strong>in</strong>g a two-panel viewer<br />

similar to that of SuperBook. Panorama Pro is also loosely <strong>in</strong>tegrated with the Web: The application can be configured<br />

as an external viewer of documents whose MIME type is SGML. Click<strong>in</strong>g on a URL <strong>in</strong> a document displayed by<br />

Panorama Pro will cause Netscape (or some other user-specified browser) to fetch and display the URL. Electronic<br />

Book Technologies' DynaText [4] is another impressive SGML viewer; it is <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>to Netscape as a plug-<strong>in</strong>. It's<br />

important to realize, however, that Panorama Pro and DynaText are not Web browsers.<br />

Our decision to expand an outl<strong>in</strong>e view <strong>in</strong> place was <strong>in</strong>spired <strong>in</strong> part by Pad++ [5], a zoom<strong>in</strong>g graphical <strong>in</strong>terface, and <strong>in</strong><br />

part by the host of successful "context+focus" visualizations developed at Xerox PARC.<br />

We are currently work<strong>in</strong>g on a proxy-based implementation of zippers that allows zipper-enhanced pages to be<br />

displayed <strong>in</strong> any Web browser. The idea is simple: A "zipper proxy" runs on the same mach<strong>in</strong>e as the user's browser and<br />

sits between the browser and the browser's normal proxy. The zipper proxy uses the normal proxy for fetch<strong>in</strong>g pages,<br />

and modifies the returned HTML to elide material and to <strong>in</strong>clude zipper icons. Each zipper icon is l<strong>in</strong>ked to a specially<br />

constructed URL that is <strong>in</strong>tercepted by the zipper proxy and which allows the zipper proxy to return an appropriate view<br />

of the page.<br />

Conclusion<br />

View<strong>in</strong>g a Web page us<strong>in</strong>g zippers has the nice property of allow<strong>in</strong>g one to see details of parts of the page while<br />

ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the global context of the entire page. The larger the Web page -- or the smaller the vertical space available<br />

for the display -- the more benefit there is to this technique. Putt<strong>in</strong>g this technology <strong>in</strong>to a browser or <strong>in</strong>to a proxy seems<br />

preferable to hand-cod<strong>in</strong>g it <strong>in</strong>to each document.<br />

References<br />

[1] A Beg<strong>in</strong>ner's Guide to HTML<br />

[2] About Bellcore's SuperBook(R) Document Browser<br />

[3] Marc H. Brown.<br />

Brows<strong>in</strong>g the Web with a Mail/News Reader.<br />

Proc. of the 8th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 197-198, November 1995.<br />

[4] EBT--Product In<strong>format</strong>ion<br />

[5] Pad++: Zoomable Graphical Interfaces<br />

[6] SoftQuad: Panorama PRO<br />

[7] UCI Bookstore Order<strong>in</strong>g In<strong>format</strong>ion

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