| Panorama Pro 2.0 | Chorus « Mixed Reviews |
| SGML
on the Web with Panorama Pro 2.0
by Gregory Murphy (gjmurphy@princeton.edu) |
| Panorama Pro
is a Web browser for SGML-encoded documents. Like its HTML-oriented counterparts,
Panorama is designed to retrieve and display local or remote files,
to navigate and search their content, and to explore annotations, images,
or other documents linked to them. Version 2.0 of the browser also supports
frames, whereby multiple documents can be viewed simultaneously in different
sections of the display window; and forms, or documents that include elements
that accept input from the user. Beyond HTML, Panorama offers the
kind of features that only well-defined, arbitrary document types make
possible. Searching can be made context sensitive. Multiple styles and
navigational aids can be associated with a single document. And collections
of hypertextual links can be used to bookmark, annotate, or join arbitrary
spans of text.
SoftQuad markets two versions of Panorama. This review covers Panorama Pro, a stand-alone browser that also acts as a style and hypertext editor. Panorama Viewer is a plug-in for Netscape Navigator that reads the same style sheets and hypertext webs created by the "professional" cousin, but that cannot create or edit them. Whereas Panorama Pro is required to publish documents on the Web, the viewer suffices for reading them. Information about both products is available from SoftQuad. Browsing Documents with Panorama Pro Panorama's interface has the familiar look and feel of a generic Windows GUI (see figure 1). An iconographic toolbar surmounted by a line of menu items graces the top of the window; the display area occupies the middle; and location and status information is written in the border along the bottom of the window. Documents can be opened directly, by specifying a file name or URL. Or, they can be passed by another application, such as a Web browser. The latter assumes that you have registered Panorama with your browser as a "helper application" that handles the MIME type text/x-sgml. In addition, you will need to let Panorama know which Web browser you are using, so that it can request any ancillary files needed to parse and display the requested document.(1) As of this release, Panorama can communicate with Netscape Navigator and Spyglass Mosaic, but not with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Documents are displayed on the right side of the window, and on the left, if selected, are displayed tables of contents, called navigators. A navigator is basically a list of labeled document parts. Each item in the list is hyper-linked to its location in the document, so any labeled section of the document can be brought up with a click of the mouse. If navigator entries form a hierarchy (e.g., when a titled chapter contain sections with titles), nested lists can be collapsed and expanded. Any number of navigators may be defined for a document or group of documents: in addition to the headings of logical units, it can be helpful to provide lists of plates or figures (the captions or even "thumbnails" of the images themselves), keywords, or unit summaries.
Gregory Murphy is the Text Systems Manager for CETH, the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Copyright © 1997 Gregory Murphy. All rights reserved. |
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