Display technologies that separate the underlying functionality of an application program from the graphical display process, thereby eliminating or reducing the application's need to control the device display and to provide graphical user interface tools and controls for the display. Additionally, such systems reduce or eliminate the need for an application program to be present on a processing system when displaying data created by or for that application program, such as a document or video stream. Thus it will be understood that in one aspect, the systems and methods described herein can display content, including documents, video streams, or other content, and will provide the graphical user functions for viewing the displayed document, such as zoom, pan, or other such functions, without need for the underlying application to be present on the system that is displaying the content. The advantages over the prior art of the systems and methods described herein include the advantage of allowing different types of content from different application programs to be shown on the same display within the same work space.