Planting – Drilling – Furrow closer
Reexamination Certificate
1996-11-18
2003-04-08
Meky, Moustafa M. (Department: 2153)
Planting
Drilling
Furrow closer
Reexamination Certificate
active
06544295
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present application relates generally to use of a computer with the Internet and, more particularly, methods for managing a user's own preferred Internet sites in a computer system having an Internet or other on-line browser.
With the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet, more and more personal computers (PC's) provide Internet access to users, typically through an Internet “browser” such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. A browser is a form of an “Internet application.” In general terms, an Internet application is an application which includes the ability to access a URL (Universal Request Locator) or “Web” site. The Internet itself is not so much defined by various connections between computers as it is by the content which it holds. A common format for representing information on the Internet is HTML or “Hyper Text Markup Language.” A browser, acting as an Internet application, accesses HTML data through the Internet. Other applications can serve as Internet applications. Microsoft Word, a popular desktop word processing program, can serve as an Internet application because it too can use a URL to access information or content from the Internet.
For the individual user, use of the Internet can range from casual to frequent use. Typically, a user has some number of “favorite” spots or locations on the Internet that he or she “visits” once or twice a week, or all the time. As one uses the Internet more frequently, there tends to be more and more favorite locations—that is, locations where one desires to store a reference to, so that one can return to that location with ease.
Given this on-line environment, one characterized by an increasing number of PC's connected to the Internet, a number of problems arise. One common problem encountered, for instance, is the task of personalizing and organizing a “subset” of the Internet continuum—that is, “marking” the Internet (i.e., creating bookmarks). A URL is, in and of itself, a “mark.” Its usefulness as a mark, however, cannot be realized unless the URL is collected and organized together with other marks which are of interest to the user.
Another problem which faces the environment is that although the URL's are “universal,” the marks which store references to them are usually not universal. A user typically sets up a number of bookmarks in his or her browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator), for instance, but those marks are no longer available to the user once the user switches to another browser or another Internet application. This problem arises because the marks reside within the context of the browser, not within the context of the Internet.
Expectedly, the task of sharing one's marks with other users is problematic. For instance, a user might have collected some marks on his or her machine at work and desired to swap those marks to a home PC. The user can no more easily share marks among the user's own machines than he or she can with other users. If the user has created a useful collection of marks, say for baseball Web site locations, the user cannot easily publish or otherwise transfer that collection to other users. Today, if one wants to reproduce bookmarks, he or she must manually reenter each one. Although this is perhaps acceptable for exchanging one URL mark, the approach is unacceptable for exchanging a list of marks and the organization of such a list. All told, although a URL itself is universal, the storage of the URL—including how it is organized and cataloged (e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer “favorites” vs. Netscape Navigator “bookmarks”)—is unique to the Internet application or to the underlying operating system. As a result, the marks are not necessarily compatible with one another, thus making them difficult or impossible to exchange.
The problem is even more general, however. There are other on-line “locations” which the user might desire to store as a mark. Besides Internet URL's, for example, the user might desire to store a “mark” to a location on a particular proprietary service, such as CompuServe or America On-line (AOL). Although each of these locations is not a URL location, the user nevertheless desires to treat such a location in the same manner as he or she would treat an Internet mark. Again, one runs into application-specific problems with marking such locations. In the case of Netscape Navigator, for instance, one can only mark URL's. In the case of Microsoft Internet Explorer, on the other hand, one might be able to create a “shortcut” to non-URL locations. Such a “shortcut” would, however, be a Microsoft proprietary solution, thus limiting the ability of the user to share such a mark with other users. In the specific instance of Microsoft Internet Explorer, each “shortcut” exists as a separate file on one's system, the interpretation of which is proprietary to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
As a common example of the difficulty of exchanging marks, consider for instance a Netscape Navigator user who desires to exchange marks with another user who happens to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. As each respective set of marks is stored in its own proprietary format, the users must resort to manually entering each mark, a tedious task at best. Further complicating this difficulty, each user is unable to access his or her own marks without the respective proprietary browser which created the marks in the first place. Once one does use the appropriate browser to access a mark, the mark can only be used to drive the operation of that browser.
Another problem which presents itself in such an environment is how one manages large lists of marks. As use of the Internet by a particular user becomes more frequent, that user tends to build up a large collection of interesting content on the Internet. Once a particular list becomes large, finding an item of interest on that list becomes a task in itself. One approach to simplifying management is to arrange a list hierarchically, such as in an outline format using “folders.” Since the approach still relies on a textual representation of a mark, however, there is a limit to its usefulness. Unlike a file-based Explorer where different file types can be represented by different icons, hierarchical representation of marks have been implemented as large lists of texts where differences between individual entries cannot be discerned at a glance. Although Microsoft Internet Explorer allows one to attach an icon to each mark item, the end result is a hierarchical list of marks with the very same icon repeated many times (thereby, providing little or no benefit). Here, the unique visual identifying feature of each item is its name, which is often long and difficult to read, if not completely cryptic. Given many bookmarks, therefore, the icons are of no value as they are all the same. Hierarchically-arranged lists help; nevertheless, the user has difficulty visually associating the correct item because the user must process numerous lines of text (which largely all look the same).
Another problem facing such an environment is that there exists marks whose corresponding sites are of interest to the user only periodically. A site which lists announcements or posts news items, for example, is of interest to the user at the point when content has actually changed. What is desired is a mechanism where one's system can efficiently determine when content of interest has changed. One approach is to have a service automatically send the user the content or notification of change in the content. Such an approach requires back-end support, together with appropriate authorizations being secured
Kopstas Tod
Meky Moustafa M.
Smith Darryl A.
Starfish Software, Inc.
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