Hello

I've written an IE add-on called IntelNav and want to let everybody
interested know about it. I'm sorry but I need to put a detailed
description here so this is going to be a rather long message. But you
don't need to read it here, you can go at

www.intelnav.com

where you can find the same info in a more structured and colorful
skin.

Enjoy.


IntelNav basics

IntelNav offers a set of back / forward buttons with improved
functionality.

The main improvement is that recently visited pages are not lost from
the lists of the 2 buttons.

Currently in IE, Firefox, Mozilla and as far as we know all other
existing browsers, navigating to a new page (by selecting a link from
within a page or by typing the URL in the address bar) empties the
list under the forward button. As a result, these pages cannot be
found any more in the 2 lists, except if they happened to be also in
the one under the back button.

IntelNav keeps the pages in the forward list when visiting a new page,
it just lets this list as it was before.

Another improvement is that the 2 lists display the URLs of the pages
as well as their titles. We think sometimes this can be useful.

A very simple typical situation:

* You've navigated to page A.
* From here, you press a link to page B,
then from page B another link to page C.
* You go back to page A, then press another link to page D.

With traditional back / fwd treatment, at this point you have no pages
in the fwd list; the fwd button is disabled.

With IntelNav, the fwd list at this point contains pages B and C, just
as it was before going from page A to page D. The back list contains
of course A, and whatever pages you were to prior to A.

Often this may be useful. For a more concrete example, say you've
googled for something and are now looking through the result list. You
go at one of the results, look around, see it's not what you wanted,
then go back to the list and try another result. You look around here
as well for a few minutes. Then suddenly it occurs to you that at the
previous result you've visited there was something that you didn't
quite notice at that moment but now it seems to be worth a closer
look. So now you have to go back to the result list and to the
previous result. But which one is it ? It's the one colored as
clicked, but what if you've already visited around 10 of them ? They
are all called alike, no wonder since they are the ones that seemed to
be what you were looking for. It may not be the one of them that's the
last one in the list. So now you have to look for a particular page in
a set of sites that look very much the same.

Of course, the problem is solvable with traditional buttons also.
You'll find the page one way or the other, either by looking through
the list, or by remembering at which of the results it might have
been, or by using the History window. But it may take a few minutes.
With IntelNav it may take a few seconds.

Possible improvements

Generally speaking, the classical back / forward buttons and the
History window will do just fine in assisting one to find a page
previously visited. However, there is some room for improvement.

The first and most simple one is the one IntelNav currently offers,
keeping the fwd list unchanged when visiting a new page. There is no
information loss compared to traditional buttons, just the gain of
having all recently visited pages in the back or fwd list, in a
natural order.

This of course is also true for the History list. This list also never
loses any visited page. But it has the drawback of basically
presenting them in the order of the time they were last visited. It
loses the navigation context of the visits. Sometimes the
chronological order may be of help; I think most of the times
preserving the navigation context is more useful.

IntelNav's back / fwd lists do a better job in preserving the
navigation context than the History list. But in this respect there's
also room for some more improvement. So let's see what this navigation
context is all about.
The navigation context

Roughly speaking, the navigation context is given by the page from
which you came to a given page, and the pages you went to from there.

This of course needs some refinement. You may have come to a page by
clicking a link from another page, or by typing its URL in the IE
address bar, or by using back / forward buttons. There are other ways
but I'll limit myself to these.

From these, only pressing a link and using the IE address bar create a
new navigation context page. With back / fwd you go back to a context
that already exists. I'll refer to these first 2 ways of going to a
page as passes. A pass to a page is either via a link or the address
bar. A jump to a page is done by means of the back / fwd button and
never creates a new context page.

Using a favorite link or the History window also count as passes.

Most of the times (but not always), a pass creates a new context page.
This is true even when the page was already visited during the same
session. That is, going for instance from page A to page B, then back
to page A then to a new page C and from here pressing a link that
leads again to page B will create a new context page for page B, even
if there is another context page for it. Page B will be duplicated.
This is useful because this way the navigation context of each visited
page is preserved best.

This leads to the notion of the navigation context tree, which can
have duplicate pages as explained above. There is a tree for each
session of a browser window (including tabs). (Conceivably the context
tree might be managed for multiple sessions, if it's saved and
restored). The root is the page that initated navigation in the given
window. Every page's children are the pages that were navigated to
from that page by using a link or the address bar.

As said, the context tree may have duplicate pages. However, if a page
is navigated to more times from the same context page (such as
navigate to A, form here to B, then back to A, then press again the
link to B), there is not much point in having the same page twice as a
child of the same page. This is a model option, I think it's most
useful to avoid duplicate child pages. So, 2 passes from the context
page A to the same web page B will not create 2 context pages for B,
but just one, for the first pass; all following passes from A to B
will be treated as jumps to this first context page. Also, if the pass
is from a page to itself (probably via the address bar, or a favorite
link), no new context will be created and the pass will be simply
ignored.

The order of the children of a page is also a model option. It matters
when the navigation context is presented to the user. I believe the
best order is that of the creation of each child context; another
possible option is the time of the last visit. Probably the best way
for both is reverse order (most recent first).
Presentation

There are a number of ways of presenting this navigation context to
the user.

The one I find most promising is as an indented list. That is, the
nodes (pages) of the tree are listed depth first; every page is
preceded by a number of blanks that's equal to its level in the tree.
Kind of like a tree directory listing.

A simple example would look like:

www.yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com/news
www.yahoo.com/news/the_man_who_ate_his_hat
www.yahoo.com/news/lawyer_sues_himself
www.yahoo.com/sports
www.yahoo.com/sports/soccer
www.yahoo.com/sports/soccer/ManU_vs_Arsl
www.google.com
www.google.com/search?
q=best+Web+navigation+tool
www.intelnav.com

The current page is not necessarily the first in the list. This is
actually a unified back-fwd lists, like the one in IE7, but it is
indented as said.

I think that having 2 separate lists is better for current navigation
tasks, that is when the user is trying to find a page among the last
say 10 - 20 visited ones. When searching in a larger list, such as all
pages visited in the current session, it's probably better to present
it unified and indented as above. It's also probably better than using
the History window for this purpose.

There's a drawback with this tree-like approach: with duplicate pages,
it's more difficult to see all pages that you went to from a page that
has duplicates. Sometimes this will be useful. So, it would probably
help to have a way to jump from one occurence of a page to the next /
previous one. This could be achieved via a pop-up menu on right-
clicking a list entry, or by any other means. Also, since the
descendant list of any page is fully expanded, it would help to be
able to compactly see all child pages of a given page. This could also
be a sub-menu entry in the pop-up menu, or it could be done by
providing a way of collapsing / expanding the list. Same for the
parent page of every page. Another must-have feature is to search the
list for a string to be found in the entry lines.

We will try to do all this in the next version of IntelNav.

Of course, all this applies not only to Internet navigation, but to
any process that involves bacl / forward buttons, such as graphical
operation systems like Windows, MacIntosh and the like, help file
viewers, file browsers and probably many other applications.


© 2007 Vlad Simionescu. All Rights Reserved

Looks like for the time being the link to www.intelnav.com is broken.
Anybody interested, use

http://intelnav.sitebooth.com

Sorry, it will be fixed soon.
V. Sim.

www.intelnav.com works again.