WebNC: efficient sharing of web applications

Abstract

WebNC is a browser plugin that leverages the Document Object Model for efficiently sharing web browser windows or recording web browsing sessions to be replayed later. Unlike existing screen-sharing or screencasting tools, WebNC is optimized to work with web pages where a lot of scrolling happens. Rendered pages are captured as image tiles, and transmitted to a central server through http post. Viewers can watch the webcasts in real-time or asynchronously using a standard web browser: WebNC only relies on html and javascript to reproduce the captured web content. Along with the visual content of web pages, WebNC also captures their layout and textual content for later retrieval. The resulting webcasts require very little bandwidth, are viewable on any modern web browser including the iPhone and Android phones, and are searchable by keyword.