Slashdot Mirror
Browsing the Web, One Sentence at a Time
rtmyers writes "A really simple yet radical idea: break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences and do useful sentence-level things. This is the paradigm shift behind the product called Infowalker, which unfortunately is implemented as an IE toolbar, but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera.
Currently implemented features include sentence-level interfaces for TTS, translation, large-type display, and the funkiest of all, dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords extracted from each sentence -- hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows today! Then there's the feature to show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading -- which presumably is the revenue model behind the product, but turns out to also be surprisingly useful.
This might not be for everyone, but it could just be the first real change in the browsing model since the earliest browsers starting throwing text up on the screen more than a decade ago. And apparently, Infowalker's architecture allows for pluggable third-party sentence-level "behaviors", with the potential for the development of a whole ecosystem of sentence-level functionality in browsers. And it seems Infowalker can also be controlled by strategically placed custom CSS tags within the HTML, raising the possibility of a new class of web pages especially tuned for this sentence-based approach."
I do not support the idea of ad-fetching based on a per-sentence reasoning, because it means more ads and interruptions (browser interstitials, really). It's totally inefficient for end users and it only gives the advertisers a hard-on because they get to really psychologically assault surfers (which is a huge turn on to advertisers because they feel like they are super-human if they can fuck with our heads... it's fucking sick if you ask me). I prefer Slashdot's method of bonus features that subscribers can get by chipping in. Why can't advertisers come up with better concepts for selling their product (perhaps by word of mouth because it's a good product, not because we're always tripping over an ad about it).
In my books, the more ads I see about a product, the less I want the product, because the product must be sold at an inflated cost to pay for advertising, or it must be a poor product if they are pushing it so hard. Word of mouth is best.
Depends upon your browser. In IE 6 most load. Mozilla, Firebird and Opera virtually all load. The icons are actual icons, so some browsers do not support them. You're probably only seeing the icons that happen to be gifs or jpegs.
Good luck with writing a spelling and grammar fixer which English-speaking people from both sides of the Atlantic are happy to use.
Here is an interesting little tool for converting from sentences to images...Symbolify..it uses Google's image search.
here is one i have just done
http://homepage.mac.com/trash80/misc/info.png
I wish. However, I believe Thomas Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" far precedes, and will far outlast the .com bubble (first published 1962).
If you ever want to claw your own eyes out and need some motivation, just read that book. He comes up with the concept of "Paradigm Shifts" and explains them in exceptionally excruciating detail.
To be fair, it was a fairly revolutionary concept of it's day -- perhaps the best proof of this point is that it took managers 30 years to latch onto the concept and suck all the usefulness out of it. Managers then, of course, proceeded to use it incessantly and inappropriately to describe any change they needed to implement, revolutionary or not.
Hey, that's pretty funny... except if you have mozilla set to ask before setting a cookie!!! Ahhhhh!!
This account of whole language is wrong on several counts. First of all, whole language, correctly taught, relies on a variety of strategies, including phonics. Secondly, whole language has a basis in developmental psychology, i.e. what we know about how kids learn. Thirdly, it actually works. I have ten years of experience as a parent aide in a school that uses whole language, and the results are phenomenal.
What usually happened in places where whole language "failed" is that a bunch of bureaucrats ordered all teachers to teach this way, without giving them proper training. So the approach gets distorted, mistaught, and misunderstood, and then (surprise!) fails.