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Kaasten, S. and Greenberg, S. (2000)
Designing an Integrated Bookmark / History System for Web Browsing. In Proceedings of the Western Computer Graphics Symposium 2000. (Panorama Mountain Village, BC, Canada), March 26-29.
Type: Refereed conference.
Also collected in: Report 2000-652-04, March.
Additional materials: powerpoint presentation.

Download as: Pdf

Abstract.
Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer attempt to make it easier for users to return to previously visited web pages. They offer three separate but important facilities: the back button, a bookmark system, and a history list. However, research indicates that users
are not utilizing all of these systems effectively. In this paper, we present a single integrated history that unifies functionality similar to the back button, bookmarks and history lists. We also show how these mechanisms can be improved upon. We pay special attention to the ways pages are presented within a display, and on providing lightweight means for marking, recalling, and revisiting pages. The prototype we are developing works within Microsoft
Internet Explorer. It presents a history list that represents pages by visual thumbnails as well as titles and URLs. It incorporates bookmark functions through a dog-ear metaphor, and it contains methods to filter a history list. Finally, it is tightly linked with the back/forward buttons.

Keywords: History, page revisitation, reuse, navigation, browser design, world wide web, hypertext.