XML and Browsing

Tim Bray is a long-time evangelist for XML who happens to live in Vancouver and his office right across the street from mine.

Recently, he was a keynote speaker at XML Europe 2001 in Berlin. Although he addressed various topics including the future potential of SOAP and the developing XML Protocol, his primary subject was the future of browsing the Web.

From the keynote:

"The Web is Boring! It's full of portals that all look the same and are all boring."

As an example of positive change, he showcased map.net, yet another "new way" to browse the web, developed, not suprisingly, by his own company Antarcti.ca.

Map.net has arranged all of the topics and websites indexed at the Open Directory Project and superimposed them on a map of Antarctica. The site looks like farmland when viewed from an airplane, with different topics having different sized and coloured swaths of real estate. Each topic is designated by the amount of information available for it on the web.

For instance, when you select the Arts area, you zoom in to find large areas for topics like Literature and Movies, along with smaller areas for Classical Studies and Online Writing. However, among the different topics are the occasional (and seemingly random) targets for sites like Garfield's Official Site and Playbill Online Chats.

Another option on the site is to navigate the world in a 3D atmosphere that is even less intuative. Placed in a city scape, you can navigate around to the different houses and buildings that represent different sites.

After playing around with it for a while, I was much more frustrated than anything. Both interfaces were so different than the ways we are all taught to look for information, I never felt like I was getting anywhere.

Navigation structures like the examples at Map.net may one day be the future of Web Browsing, but it will take a long time for those of us that use language as our method of browsing and searching.