In recent years we have seen the
explosive growth of small Internet devices such as handheld
computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart
phones that have been used to leverage the capabilities of
the Web and provided users with ubiquitous access to
information than ever before. Despite the proliferation of
these devices, their usage for accessing the Web today is
still largely constraint by their small form factors such as
small screen. Because most of today’s web page has been
designed with the desktop computer in mind, and is often too
large to fit into the small screen of a mobile device. Web
browsing on such small devices is like seeing a mountain in
a distance from a telescope. It requires the user to
manually scroll the window to find the content of interest
and position the window properly for reading information.
This tedious and time-consuming process has largely limited
the usefulness of these devices.
In order to improve the browsing experience, various
adaptation methods have been proposed to modify web contents
to meet the requirement of client capability and network
bandwidth. For instance, methods were proposed for
distilling web objects to reduce the consumption of network
bandwidth and client computation. For web pages, the
existing methods are mostly based on discarding format
information. While this mainly focuses on reducing resource
consumption, there are still many works on beautifying the
web page representation on small form factor devices. In
another approach, the web page is reformatted on the basis
of page annotation. However, this approach requires a
practical solution to facilitate the creation of annotations
for existing web pages. The re-authoring technique required
web pages to have sections and section headers, which
however, are rarely used in web page authoring today. A
different method suggests the generation of an accordion
representation where the detail content can be folded or
unfolded at client device. Since this method focuses on text
summarization, it does not leverage the graphic capabilities
of current devices.
