Re: a web-browser UI concept

[Graham J Lee]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 12:12, Camille Bourgoin wrote:

> Hello !
>
> This morning, in my bath, I think of a user-interface concept for a
> web-browser. I wrote a paper about it. Maybe is it bad, maybe it can
> be useful for somebody.
>
>
> The concept is in my website, here :
> http://jbbourgoin.free.fr/site/index.php? 
> option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=49

The toolbar separated from the document view is novel (OmniWeb <4.0  
had the bookmarks inspector as a separate window, but IIRC that was  
it).  OTOH, how much sense does that make?  For things like zoom,  
help etc. it's fine.  But buttons like forward, back, history act _on  
a document_ so separating them from the document view seems off to  
me.  Of course, your kilometrage may vary.

Not a specific comment about your own design but I find it hard to  
marry the concept of tabbed browsers with a document-based  
design...document-based apps should have one (or more) windows per  
document, whereas tabs gives you one or more documents per window.   
On the other hand, people tend to view web pages at something close  
to the full size of their screen so a suitably flexible tab system  
(like OmniWeb 5.x) can be a benefit to screen-space organisation.

> The article is in french, but the sketches are in english (I'm not
> very good in english, sorry :( )

Nous sommes une bonne équipe, parce que je ne comprends pas un mot de  
français ;-).

Salut,

Graham.