Speaking of navigating the WWW...
The folks that brought you www.thebrain.com have recently brought up a new
site: www.webbrain.com. I fooled around with it the other day.
One thing I like: it gives you links before you get to the end of the tree.
It doesn't do this at every level, but it does it fairly often. For
instance, you may not have to navigate all the way through
WebBrain->Games->Board Games->Alphabetical Listing->C->Chess to find a link
that might give you information on the history of chess. A "history of
games" site appears in the bottom half of the screen at the Games level. And
this link points to a site that does contain a brief but interesting history
of chess.
Another thing I like is that it gives you a little access to the level from
which you came. It appears that it caches the categories from the previous
level as you can scroll through a list of them. It is a graphical 2.5D
(almost 3D) navigation system.
What I would like to see is more functionality on the "mouse over". I think
it should display a description of the category or allow a quick peek at the
level below.
I don't know about WebNav but there's another Java applet that does
exist. It is an on-going IBM project called Mappucino:
http://www.ibm.com/java/mapuccino/index.html. Another similar product
(commercial this time) is Inxight SiteLens: http://www.inxight.com. Both of
them parse a site and display the site's organization as a graphical map
that users can navigate through.
Gil
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 11:00:23 PDT