The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming increasingly important for business, education, and entertainment. Popular web browsers make access to Internet information resources relatively easy for novice users. Simply by clicking on a link, a new page of information replaces the current one on the screen. Unfortunately however, after following a number of links, people can have difficulty remembering where they've been and navigating links they have followed. As one's collection of web pages grows and as more information of interest populates the web, effective navigation becomes an issue of fundamental importance.We are developing a prototype zooming browser to explore alternative mechanisms for navigating the WWW. Instead of having a single page visible at a time, multiple pages and the links between them are depicted on a large zoomable information surface. Pages are scaled so that the page in focus is clearly readable with connected pages shown at smaller scales to provide context. As a link is followed the new page becomes the focus and existing pages are dynamically repositioned and scaled. Layout changes are animated so that the focus page moves smoothly to the center of the display surface while contextual information provided by linked pages scales down.While our browser supports multiscale representations of existing HTML pages, we have also extended HTML to support multiscale layout within a page. This extension, Multi-Scale Markup Language (MSML), is at an early stage of development. It currently supports inclusion within a page of variable-sized dynamic objects, graphics, and other interface mechanisms from our underlying Pad++ substrate. This provides sophisticated client-side interactions, permits annotations to be added to pages, and allows page constituents to be used as independent graphical objects.In this paper, we describe our prototype web browser and authoring facilities. We show how simple extensions to HTML can support sophisticated client-side interactions. Finally, we discuss the results of preliminary user-interface testing and evaluation.

Studies tested the hypothesis that myocardial ischemia induces increased paraspinal muscular tone localized to the T(2)-T(5) region that can be detected by palpatory means. This is consistent with theories of manual medicine suggesting that disturbances in visceral organ physiology can cause increases in skeletal muscle tone in specific muscle groups. Clinical studies in manual and traditional medicine suggest this phenomenon occurs during episodes of myocardial ischemia and may have diagnostic potential. However, there is little direct evidence of a cardiac-somatic mechanism to explain these findings. Chronically instrumented dogs [12 neurally intact and 3 following selective left ventricular (LV) sympathectomy] were examined before, during, and after myocardial ischemia. Circumflex blood flow (CBF), left ventricular contractile function, electromyographic (EMG) analysis, and blinded manual palpatory assessments (MPA) of tissue over the transverse spinal processes at segments T(2)-T(5) and T(11)-T(12) (control) were performed. Myocardial ischemia was associated with a decrease in myocardial contractile function and an increase in heart rate. MPA revealed increases in muscle tension and texture/firmness during ischemia in the T(2)-T(5) segments on the left, but not on the right or in control segments. EMG demonstrated increased amplitude for the T(4)-T(5) segments. After LV sympathectomy, MPA and EMG evidence of increased muscle tone were absent. In conclusion, myocardial ischemia is associated with significant increased paraspinal muscle tone localized to the left side T(4)-T(5) myotomes in neurally intact dogs. LV sympathectomy eliminates the somatic response, suggesting that sympathetic neural traffic between the heart and somatic musculature may function as the mechanism for the interaction.

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