Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to content browsing and more particularly to frequent content management in content browsing.
Description of the Related Art
The advent of the global Internet has facilitated access to an unimaginable quantity of information to even the most casual end user. Concurrently with the development of the Internet, developers have produced several content retrieval systems, most famously the world wide web (the “Web”). In the Web, just as in other content retrieval systems, content is stored in different content servers and retrieved into a content browser upon specifying a network location of the content within the content browser. Initially unique to the Web, however, was the notion of hyperlinking in which content pages incorporate activatable references—namely hyperlinks—such that the selection of a hyperlink in one content page led to the loading and display in the content browser of the content referenced by the hyperlink.
In the early years of the Web, Web content and its presentation remained static, with both the formatting and positioning of the content specified according to the hypertext markup language (HTML). As such, modifying either content or the presentation of the content in a Web page involved the direct editing of the Web page—a tedious and error prone process. As the Web has evolved, however, content is no longer static and often is defined according to dynamic methodologies, and programmatic code including scripts. Further, the content and presentation of a Web page are no longer composite elements of a Web page. Rather, the presentation has been separate from the content, most notably through the use of style sheets and other templated presentation technologies. Consequently, while content itself can remain static, the layout of the content in a Web page, or within a Web site can change quite often.
Given the vast expanse of the Web and other content repositories, several mechanisms have been developed for end users to repeatedly retrieve content of interest. Ranging from the venerable “bookmark” to the more sophisticated subscription oriented aggregative technologies such as portals and syndicated feeds, these frequent content retrieval mechanisms render the Web more manageable for end users. Even still, frequent content is not merely limited to a page of content, but often frequent content is more granular in nature such as a particular portion of a page of content, or even just a display field in a page of content. Thus, while the page itself may remain constant over time, the presentation and layout of a page can change so as to displace content of interest thereby obscuring its location from the end user. In that circumstance, conventional frequent content retrieval mechanisms will have failed.