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The Temporal Dimension in End User Web Programming
Eytan Adar, Mira Dontcheva, James Fogarty, Daniel S. Weld

Despite the dynamic nature of the Web, most people view a static snapshot. Search engines, browsers, and higher level end-user programming environments only support observing and manipulating a single point in time—the “now.” We propose that moving beyond this static viewpoint is important because a) maintaining a temporal view of the Web allows users to more clearly understand the behavior of their “programs” both in static and dynamic contexts and b) temporally changing information on the Web is interesting in its own right. In this paper we discuss the opportunities and challenges of integrating the temporal dimension in end-user programming environments and our experiences with Zoetrope, a tool for interacting with the ephemeral (i.e. dynamic) Web.

Available as a pre-print in PDF (108Kb), to appear, Workshop on End User Programming for the Web, CHI'09