Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
2000-04-13
2003-03-25
Kincaid, Kristine (Department: 2174)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C709S217000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06538673
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a method for extracting digests, reformatting, and automatic monitoring of structured online documents based on visual programming of document tree navigation and transformation. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method whereby a user selects a fragment of an online document shown in a source window and copies this fragment to the target window, the system creates a sequence of commands that can reproduce this behavior when applied to the new versions of the source documents downloaded from the information source, such as web site.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Structured online documents, especially HTML and XML documents available on the World Wide Web (WWW) have become very important in the past few years. Such documents contain data which may be periodically updated, wherein such updating does not substantially change the format of presentation of such data.
These online documents usually are dynamically generated by the web servers and they present data stored in online databases. This data periodically changes, but since these documents are automatically generated by computers, the presentation document structure remains substantially the same for relatively long periods of time. Additionally, even when the web page is updated manually, the presentation document structure may remain substantially the same for relatively long periods of time.
Examples of such frequently updated online documents include: stock quotes from brokerage web sites; prices of specific items from online commercial vendor sites and from online auction sites; local weather information from weather web sites; airline ticket information provided by airline or travel sites; shipment tracking information from the mail delivery companies; current news headlines from the news organizations web sites; latest press releases of a specific company issued on their web site; bank account balances for an individual or corporation from the bank web site.
While all this data may be of great interest to the user, it is often accompanied by data that is unimportant or even irrelevant to a particular user. This irrelevant data unnecessarily complicates comprehension and interpretation of the relevant data and often leads to the user missing important changes in the relevant data.
Examples of the data that may be unimportant to the user are:
1. Stock quotes for a stock of interest to the user are often accompanied by other data such as number of shares outstanding, opening and closing prices, earnings in the last quarter and so on. While the user may need to check this data once every 2 or 3 months, the user is not likely to want to see this data every time a current stock quote is sought.
2. Fluctuating price for an item in an online store that interests user may be accompanied with advertising for other items that the user has no interest in or it may be accompanied with product photographs which user has already seen many times.
3. Balances of the user's bank accounts may appear in separate online documents (web pages) and be accompanied by the last 10 transactions. The user, however wants to monitor only balances of all his or her accounts in the bank so that every balance appears in a small window unaccompanied by any other information.
In addition to this, if the user wants to monitor important data, he or she will find it necessary to push the browser “Reload” button to obtain the latest data from the remote database. This requires considerable manual effort and can be fatiguing even when monitoring one online document. The manual effort required for monitoring several online documents simultaneously is so great that it makes such monitoring very difficult, if not impossible to do on a regular basis.
Summary. Online documents generated by online databases provide valuable data that a user may want to monitor. However, this essential information is often accompanied by large quantities of non-essential and even irrelevant information, or information that rarely changes and does not need to be monitored.
Therefore, a method is needed that allows a user to automate monitoring of essential data extracted from online documents while ignoring non-essential or irrelevant data.
In the remainder of this Section we present the state of the art in the technical area of this invention and show how this invention differs from the state of the art.
HTML, browsers, and DOM
HTML, and XML structured online documents are displayed using web browsers such as Navigator by Netscape® Communications and Internet Explorer by Microsoft® corporation.
A web browser is used in the preferred embodiment of the present invention.
However, none of the browsers known to us can display a document fragment in a separate window with no window treatments so that irrelevant information is not seen by the user and this window takes small space on user's screen. Also none of the browsers known to us implement automatic refresh.
The present invention augments the browser behavior and it uses the ability of the more advanced browsers to be controlled by other applications. Also the present invention uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to navigate the content of an online document represented as a tree of nodes.
Web site server-side customizations
Most major websites allow limited server-side customization of their content. Examples are MyYahoo!® on the Yahoo!® website, My Netscape® on the Netscape® website, and the like. These customizations are nothing more than accounts created for users on these web sites. Users see the customized content when they login into their accounts on the web site.
Web site customizations provide a limited choice of what can be customized. For example, the user usually can select a portfolio of stocks to be displayed, but he or she usually cannot select what parameters are presented for a particular stock. Also usually such customizations are limited to very few online data categories. For instance, user can monitor all U.S. stock using such customization, but he or she cannot monitor, say, Brazilian stock even though online stock quotes for Brazilian stock may be available online.
Furthermore, creating user-customized web site content requires complicated and therefore expensive programming from the web site maintainers, so this option is not practical for smaller web sites because of its price and complexity.
Finally, server-customized web pages are still shown in a regular web browser window that has a lot of unnecessary window treatments and user is still required to push the “Reload” button every time he wants to update.
Using the present invention, the user can arbitrarily customize and monitor any web page content and select any presentation format for the customized content, and no programming is required both on web server side and on the user side.
Online data providers
Several online services exist that can push certain online data such as stock quotes to the user's wired or wireless device such as pager or computer.
These services compare to the present invention in the same way as server-side web site customizations, because they have the same problems: limited choice of content that can be monitored, no way to arbitrarily customize presentation of such content and what parameters are included, expensive server-side programming is required.
XML and XSLT
Several techniques exist that transform a higher level abstract document presentation to the lower level document presentation used for rendering the document. Most notable effort in this area is XSLT language that is used to write programs that transform XML documents to HTML documents that are rendered in a web browser. More information about the XSLT language and XML documents can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.
These techniques do not cover the present invention because they are used to synthesize lower level document presentation from the higher level document presentation but they do not change the content of the document. The pr
Bell Boyd & Lloyd LLC
Divine Technology Ventures
Kincaid Kristine
Nguyen Thomas T.
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