DeckScape(1) DeckScape(1)
NAME
DeckScape - An Experimental World-Wide Web Browser
SYNTAX
DeckScape [-clean]
DESCRIPTION
DeckScape is an experimental World-Wide Web browser based on the
metaphor of a deck of playing cards, where each card is a Web page, and
each deck is displayed in its own window. As the user traverses links,
new pages appear on top of the current deck. Retrievals are done using
a background thread, so all visible pages in any deck are active at all
times. Users can move and copy pages between decks, and decks can be
used as a general-purpose way to organize material, such as hotlists,
query results, and breadth-first expansions.
More details about the system can be found in SRC 135:
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-135a.html
This paper appeared in the Third International World-Wide Web Confer-
ence (April 1995). A short version of it appeared in CHI'95:
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/Electronic/documnts/short-
ppr/mhb2_bdy.htm
WWW_HOME -- The URL of the "home" page. At SRC, the current value is
"http://src-www.pa.dec.com/src.home.html".
http_proxy -- The name of a proxy server. The format is "http://foo",
with an optional port. At SRC, the current value is "http://www-
proxy.pa.dec.com:8080/".
no_proxy -- Domain names for which no proxy should be consulted. The
format is a comma-separated list of domain names, with an optional
port. At SRC, the current value is "src-www,.dec.com".
Images are displayed using the following ppm filters: giftoppm, ppm-
topgm, pgmtopbm, djpeg, and xbmtopbm.
FILES
The system maintains the state of the decks in the file
~/.deckscape between invocations. If the system crashes on startup,
try deleting this file, or start DeckScape with the -clean flag. The
file is essentially a list of URLs; if you edit it, do so carefully!
BUGS
The HTML viewer is fragile and vanilla. It recognizes HTML 2.0, except
for forms; however, the viewer does not deal with incorrect HTML very
gracefully and most Web pages contain incorrect HTML. The system does
not support external viewers.
Marc H. Brown and Robert A. Shillner
Marc H. Brown
DeckScape(1)