Multi-level web surfing

Web browsers have become the most popular interactive interfaces ever developed and widely deployed in the computing history. Through links embedded in a web page, a user can browse virtually any digital resources in the world. Although these links are naturally interconnected and hierarchical, the browsing model is typically in linear and at any point of time only one-level of information can easily displayed in the whole hierarchy. For example, to browse a book, first the top-level information (say, table of contents) is downloaded and displayed. Click a chapter link to a specific chapter (the next-level information). Click back button to go back to the top-level. Click another chapter link to go to the next level of information. Click back button to go back to the top-level and so on. This paper describes a multi-level web surfing system that allows a user to display multi-level of information and browse at any level without losing the information of the current level. With the system, a user can select either a hint window displaying the extracts of a linked page when the mouse is over a link or a pop window showing the linked page when the mouse is over a link without clicking it.