- From: <cay4@cornell.edu>
- Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 03:38:51 -0400 (EDT)
- To: bluesky@seawood.org
- cc: german@netscape.com, rjc@netscape.com, mozilla-editor@mozilla.org, hyatt@netscape.com, waterson@netscape.com, brendan@mozilla.org, shaver@mozilla.org, endico@mozilla.org, www-rdf-comments@w3.org, mozilla-rdf@mozilla.org, stefan@db.stanford.edu, swick@w3.org, emiller@oclc.org, schloss@watson.ibm.com, singer@almaden.ibm.com, Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk, Dave.Beckett@bristol.ac.uk, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Dear James "the Blue-Sky dude" Hicks and RDF guys, (and project leaders who probably don't want to be bothered with this stuff), I've had this idea in my head for a while now. Just listen for a sec. Every time I'm at a page where sequential pages are viewed, --like some kind of slide show type thing, or multiple pages in an article-- there's always that link somewhere on the page that takes you to the next page or image or whatever in the sequence. Anyway, it's a pain in the arse when that link is at the bottom of the page (or just below the bottom of your browser window) and you need to scroll down or go find that link and click on it before you can get to the next page. What I suggest is an optional tag (invisible, maybe even a META tag?) that could be embedded into a web page with a link to the next and previous pages. However, this optional HTML tag's "link" would actually be connected to a button in the browser interface itself or attached to a keyboard-shortcut. The page creator would obviously put a conventional link to the next page so -older- browsers could get to the page with a click on a conventional link but implementers of my suggested standard could get to the next page multiple ways. This way you could either just keep your mouse in the same location in your browser application (similar to the forward and backward buttons) and just click, click, click to skip the pages you don't want to read or to move through them quickly - or you could use a keyboard shortcut that would take your browser to the META_NEXT page. This would keep the user from having to move the mouse all over the place just to get to the next page if the link lies below the bottom of the browser window or its location changes between pages due to lazy formatting. Now granted, many pages DO have links to the next page at the top of the page that remain in the same place everytime, but I still think this would be an extremely useful feature (and easy to implement!). The only problem would be that you would need two more buttons (actually 4 buttons would be good - <<Start <Back Forward> End>>). These could "look" similar to the standard <Back Forward> buttons but their function would be dependent on the particular page you are viewing and NOT on the pages you have recently visited. Hard links if you will.... or dynamic somehow if you wanted via CSS or some other newfangled web technology. If you have ever seen one of those PowerPoint presentations people can publish to the web, that's the kind of interface I'm talking about...just move the buttons to the browser app itself instead of having images in the page link to the next page. Example:http://salsa.cit.cornell.edu/cs213-fa00/Lectures/20000926/sld001.htm These are at the top, but wouldn't it be nice if you could have a keyboard shortcut move you through this presentation?! Please feel free to give me credit wherever you can. I'd appreciate it. :) I'm also not setup for news:// to submit this to news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist so I was wondering Blue-Sky dude if you might forward this to that list for me please... Thanks. Feedback on whether this is viable technology or not would also be interesting. Ok, OK.... "Technology" is a stretch, but just reply real quick (no, not reply-to-all?) and let me know what you think.... Oh, and "Have a Great Day!" Sincerely, Cyrus Yunker cay4@cornell.edu
Received on Wednesday, 18 October 2000 03:39:14 UTC