Multivalent Browser

NEW Fabio Corubolo's Fab Four browser builds on top of Multivalent document parsing and rendering engine to add a Swing interface, tabs, and printing.

How to Run

After downloading the browser, simply

double-click on its icon

or from the command line type

java -jar path-to-JAR/Multivalent.jar

with Multivalent.jar in the current directory or in your CLASSPATH. If it is sluggish on Windows, try turning off DirectX:

java -Dsun.java2d.ddoffscreen=false -jar Multivalent.jar

The browser starts up with an introduction page and links to more documentation, as well as many demos, most of which can't be demonstrated in HTML / JavaScript / DOM.

To run through a proxy, set the relevant properties as described by Sun, as in something like

java -jar Multivalent.jar -Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy.berkeley.edu

Ed Randall reports that it can be run as a servlet by first setting the user.home variable, which is otherwise null:

JAVA_OPTS="-Duser.home=/tmp"; export JAVA_OPTS

Built-in Features

This page organizes and links to documentation for features that happen to be packaged with the base system. See Links for third-party extensions. The documentation will often include a screen dump and demo the feature, the latter in most cases requiring the Multivalent Browser to experience.

Media Adaptors

Natively view all formats.

Documents compressed with UNIX compress or GNU gzip or BZip2 are uncompressed on the fly.

Annotations

All document formats can be annotated.

highlight, of different colors
hyperlink and anchors
note — editable text in a moveable, resizable window. Notes can themselves be annotated.
move text, which is executable
short comment
replace with
all caps, initial cap, lowercase

See annotations as notemarks in View menu.
Edit, delete, and move annotations.

Lenses

Lenses are moveable, resizable windows that transform the content seen through them. When lenses overlap, their effects compose.

Magnify, Bit Magnify
Show OCR and Show Image (on scanned paper)
Cypher — Rot-13, Reverse words, Pig Latin, alphabetic shift left/right
Plain View, which strains out gaudy colors
Mirror view
Sharpen, blur, edge detect, brighten, darken
Ruler, which can be sized for horizontal or vertical layout
word bounds and Unicode character numbers (for developers)

Tools

full screen slide show of paginated documents (PDF, DVI, Xdoc, ...) [Go menu]
send selection to another web server for network services such as dictionary lookup and web searching [via popup menu]
telephone touch tone (a two hour project) [popup menu on selection]
executive summary collapses the page, showing only structure and Notemarks
scrollbar visualization of search hits
slide show of links in the page
scroll with cursor anywhere in the page by pressing button 2 and dragging
speed reading window - flashes words up one at a time at same location to reduce saccadic eye movement, with adjustable speed
table sorting, as on file directory listings

Network-related Behaviors

The browser recognizes Robust Hyperlinks. Any robust URL that would have broken (generated a 404 error) based on the URL alone, now offers content-based retrieval in web search engines.
You can see how current the page is by glancing at the its last modified date in the upper right corner. Not all web servers report this information, however. You can turn it off under the View menu. It can be interesting to see how accurate any corresponding "late updated" line in the page is.
Remote control. The browser can be controlled by sending messages to it via an HTTP connection on port 5549. Most languages can do this, as well as other browsers. The general form is the following: http://localhost:5549/comand?argument where the command is a semantic event name. For example, the following opens the front page of the New York Times: http://localhost:5549/openDocument?http://www.nytimes.com/
Reverse links popup menu sends the current page's URL to a search engine (if the protocol is http or ftp).

Customization

custom

Automatically - window size and position, settings of switches.
Change home page, remap behaviors, and various other things in Preferences.txt. (Later have dialog boxes.)
Genre style sheet

Developer Support

Developers can take advantage of these system features:

GUI widgets, which have been written from scratch, use the same tree nodes as used for document content, and so have the same expressiveness. Have a blinking menu item, embed an HTML table in a button, or put a scanned paper document in a floating note.
Lenses that report information in situ. The Ruler can help measure layout sizing. Bounds shows bounding boxes.

Turning on Debug Mode in the Help menu activates a new Debug menu with several introspection tools.

Live document tree display, of current document or entire UI tree. Also useful for style sheet writers as displays tags and attributes.
Dumps of various internal data structures

Standard Features

The browser supports most standard browser features, including:

Multiple browser instances
Select and paste text (whether from HTML, scanned paper, PDF, or whatever)
Drag and drop of URLs into browser
Forward/Back buttons; click and hold to get menu of other pages in path
Home, Reload
History
Bookmarks - simple for now
View Page Source
Search
Lenient URL acceptance (e.g., no "http://") URL type-in (Note: On Windows, with its dopey drive letters, specify file URLs as if the letter were an additional directory, as in file:/D:/Documents/TODO.html. All URLs still use forward slashes.), browse file system for file to load (file browser is one of few places that use Java Swing widgets)
HTTP protocol: referer [sic], cookies, return code, ...
Cache - separates general web pages and personal annotations; no image cacheing yet
Key bindings: Emacs, Windows -- settable in hub, apply to type-in field, note, and everywhere else
Last and least, the BLINK span, available under the Style menu, works with any document type, including scanned images, probably a first.