DrawBack browser design-document #1

Jorn Barger July 2002

The DrawBack desktop will be limited to rectangles (rects):

[desktop rects]

The ideal startingplace of the design is that these primitive rects should enjoy all the powers of windows, menus, icons, text-blocks, images, etc, merged into an intuitive unity.

Most of these capabilities will normally be unused, but any rect on the desktop can be easily edited to change its function, using a standardised dialog like ResEdit (Mac). A scripting language will handle the basic responses to events like mouse-clicks, so these can also be customised.

Rects can be containers for other rects. Paragraphs, words, letters, lines, and pixels may be temporarily instantiated as rects, allowing them to be rearranged by dragging within their container-rect, or copied by dragging to a new container-rect (dropping). But rects within a container will normally be 'locked' to prevent rearrangement.

Clicking on a rect may select it, or open a menu-rect, or open a new window-rect. If the clicked rect is a link in a webpage, it may cause the displayed page to be replaced by the linked page.

webpages

Handling of webpages is the core of DrawBack's power.

It will use a general-purpose webpage-parser to analyse new webpages into information-components like text-blocks, navigation-menus, and images. Surfers can easily customise how they want a given site's pages to be displayed (suppressing html-junk, reformatting useful info) and these 'smart local stylesheets' will be saved.

Text-rects can be rearranged by dragging. Clicking on the rect might offer a menu of formatting options, including: hide,

Dropping a url/link onto a page-rect in authoring mode will insert it as an html anchor, prompting you for anchor-text. It will remember what page it was dragged from, and possibly a chain of source-pages, maybe originating with a searchpattern submitted to a particular searchengine on a particular date.

Suggestions

You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.

If you want credit, include your name and email (otherwise it's anonymous). You can use HTML but you don't have to.

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