When you first encounter the 'Hunt' view, by clicking on the similarily named tab along the top of the screen, you should hopefully be greeted by a familiar screen. The majority of the screen is dedicated to the view of the webpage, and also provides scrollable ability if the page shown is large than the available space. The document shown within this pane is either a 'rendered' HTML page, or and image or other media. Rendering is the process whereby specially structured text, such as HTML, is turned into a formatted page. The document itself is exactly the same as any web-page shown in Internet Explorer or similar internet browing software, with hyperlinks underlined and highlighted. Clicking on a hyperlink will take you to the page it refers to. At the very bottom of the screen is the status bar which gives you feedback as to what the browser is currently doing. When it displays 'Ready' the current page is fully loaded.

Directly above the page view, and in the center of the screen, is the address field. You type URL addresses into this box, which should be in the same form as http://www.greenstone.org/ or http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ etc. The field will also be updated to show the address of any page you surf through to (by clicking on hyperlinks within the html page), or are redirected to.

To the left and right of the address field are six buttons. These provide control over the web page being shown. The buttons are, from left to right: Back, Reload, Home, Go, Stop and Forward. Back is used to return to the previous page you viewed this session, and will only have an effect if there was a page previous to the currently shown one. Reload caused the currently displayed page to be reloaded from its web source, ensuring the latest copy is shown or reattempting to find images and other imbedded objects that may have failed on the first attempt. Home causes the nzdl homepage to be loaded. Go is used to make the browser visit the url you have typed in the address field. It is usually quicker to press [Enter] while in the address field. Stop causes the browser to stop whatever it is doing and return to the ready state. Forward only works if you have previously gone back in the browsing history, and it loads the next page you visited. To review which button is which, let your mouse pointer sit over it for a moment and its name should appear.

Currently no 'perfect' html renderer exists for pure java programs. The package I've choosen to use, CalpaHTML, is one of the best, but it too has some drawbacks. The most common of these is that it flickers when its renderer a web page that contains animated images. Less common, but more problematic, is when it encounters pages with heavy use of frames, internal frames or nested tables. Most of the time these pages will render, although their layout will be questionable. Occasionally they will cause CalpaHTML to get stuck in an infinite loop, and even pressing stop will have no effect. The only solution known is to press the back button, which will return you to the last page successfully rendered. However you will not be able to view the problem page in the built-in browser.

Investigation was done into whether we could use a more stable, native HTML renderer, such as the Mozilla engine, to renderer. But these too had serious drawbacks such as lack of control, the restriction to only one view pane per JVM and large library sizes (increasing the size of Librarian Interface to unreasonable proportions).

(That said, I have found web pages which even Internet Explorer and Netscape refuse to render, so perhaps the Librarian Interfaces not doing too badly.)