Navigation in Hypertext

Dynamic Tracking Maps

Although Intermedia is a no-longer-available system, it provided some features that solved the basic problem of orienting readers. The most Intermedia important feature that current systems lack, its system-generated dynamic tracking map, was described in [Landow]. This dynamic tracking map idea was evolved through three stages:

1. The Global Tracking Map provided graphic information about all links and documents in a particular body of linked documents. Clicking twice upon the icon of a particular hypertext corpus simultaneously opened that hypertext web and generated a document in which icons representing each document in the web were joined by lines representing all links between documents.
2. The Local Tracking Map presented icons for all documents linked to whichever one was currently active.Each time the reader opened a new document or activated a previously opened one, the Local Tracking Map transformed itself, thus informing readers where they could go next.
3. The Web View presented all documents attached to the entire overview, the overview has a hierarchical organization but does not reveal the nature or number of documents linked to each block. Clicking upon a particular link and thus activating it darkened all the links attached to that block in the Web View. Thus, working together, individual documents and the Web View continually informed the reader what information lay one jump away from the current text.

Because of the Web View's quality, various research and commercially available systems have had partial analogues to it [Landow].

Last modified: 6 Nov 2002 by Kathy Nguyen Dang