With the fast advance of browser technologies and World Wide Web infrastructures, more and more content or applications are accessed via a browser. However, most web documents are designed to carry a variety of content elements for multiple purposes. Often times, a user interested in a portion of content or an interactive application can be presented with myriads of information of no interest to the user at all. It is not unusual for a browser user to be distracted by navigation controls, user interface controls of a web document, advertising, marketing, or promotional campaign from a web document while trying to focus only on the interested portion of content.
Additionally, an article may be hyperlinked and buried in multiple web documents intentionally designed to increase both space and time to expose as much irrelevant information as possible to a user. Thus, in addition to making an effort to locate where an article is on a presentation layout of a web page, the user has to perform user interface actions to request and wait for other portions of the article. As a result, accessing content such as articles embedded inside web pages via a browser can often lead to intermittent and frustrating user experience.
Furthermore, a browser commonly provides a progress indicator to give a user some indication as to the progress of downloading a web page. However, most progress indicators are based on network connection activities and ignorant of actual content being downloaded. As a result, such indicators may keep the user waiting for a network connection to complete even when those content interesting to the user in the web page may already been downloaded and available in the browser.
Therefore, accessing content included in web documents via traditional browsers do not provide users with smooth, focused and friendly experiences.