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."

Comments

April Fools?

[moehoward]

Come on. Who reads that way. We read by browsing, skimming, skipping. We do our own keyword search in our heads and skip the all-to-common fluff and bad writing that's crammed into Web pages.

For a 6 year-old, this might work. But they are missing some key points on how Web pages are consumed in the real world.

Making a pig's ear...

[Snart Barfunz]

out of a non-semantic web. As units of language, sentences are still context sensitive, so this will very quickly get mired in throwing up offensive and inapropriate results. Imagine an article 'Man driven to suicide by music of Justin Timberlake' followd by 'Buy Justin Timberlake CDs on Amazon'.

Nonsense!

[Dun Malg]

This hogwash is the kind of pointless, ludicrous nonsense thought up by the same kind of jackass nutcase fools who come up with shit like the "whole language" method of teaching children to read*. They start with a totally unsubstantiated premise which, in their ignorance, they take as fact and base an entire line of reasoning upon it. Eventually, they end up with a sophisticated (and usually expensive) system that doesn't really do anything, much to their surprise. What am I supposed to do with a whole raft of pictures keyed to each individual sentence? What possible use is this, besides targeted marketing?

What they've come up with is an ingenious method of directing advertisements, but they've completely failed to provide any reason for consumers to use it. Hey, I've got an even better idea! Let's give away a set-top box that hooks up to your cable/satellite receiver and overlays small ads while you watch TV! Advertisers will love it because they can target ads based on what people are watching. Now all we have to do it get people to hook this box up to their TV. Perhaps if we have it overlay the time and temperature as well, people will want it for its utility....yeah...that's it...

* "whole language" is where you don't teach kids to read at the phonetic/letter level, but instead just let them learn whole words "naturally" by following along in their own book while the teacher reads aloud. If this seems ridiculous and nonsensical, that's because it is. It was dreamed up by a fool who "observed" that when one reads, one doesn't sound out individual letters, and then assemble the letters into words; no, one just reads words. The logical flaw here is the assumption that there is no letter-level parsing when, in fact, there is-- it's just not noticable as a distinct step because we do it so efficiently.