I/O/D—Web Stalker
The British group I/O/D claimed that conventional Web browsers do a poor job of visually representing the information structures of sites being visited. It created a highly visual browser called Web Stalker, which deconstructs existing sites. Designed to cut out advertising and other nonessential “noise,” it uses circles and lines to portray the linkage structures of the Web and allows the user to operate on the representation. Matthew Fuller, one of its creators, explains the search for alternative “maps” of Web space:
A lot of the working capabilities within the [standard commercial] browser have been determined by the needs of advertisers, corporations, and so on, rather than experimentation with the format of the Web. . . . Web Stalker is based on the belief that the user should be able to define the different functions they want to apply to a Web document, rather being than launched through a finished Web site.