Detecting web page structure for adaptive viewing on small form factor devices

Mobile devices have already been widely used to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. In this paper, we propose a new browsing convention to facilitate navigation and reading on a small-form-factor device. A web page is organized into a two level hierarchy with a thumbnail representation at the top level for providing a global view and index to a set of sub-pages at the bottom level for detail information. A page adaptation technique is also developed to analyze the structure of an existing web page and split it into small and logically related units that fit into the screen of a mobile device. For a web page not suitable for splitting, auto-positioning or scrolling-by-block is used to assist the browsing as an alterative. Our experimental results show that our proposed browsing convention and developed page adaptation scheme greatly improve the user's browsing experiences on a device with a small display.

[1]  Craig A. Knoblock,et al.  Wrapper generation for semi-structured Internet sources , 1997, SGMD.

[2]  Bill N. Schilit,et al.  Digestor: Device-Independent Access to the World Wide Web , 1997, Comput. Networks.

[3]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  Extracting Semistructured Information from the Web. , 1997 .

[4]  Eric A. Brewer,et al.  Adapting to network and client variation using infrastructural proxies: lessons and perspectives , 1998, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[5]  Kouichi Ono,et al.  Annotation-based Web content transcoding , 2000, Comput. Networks.

[6]  Jinlin Chen,et al.  Adaptive Delivery of HTML Contents , 2000 .

[7]  Andreas Paepcke,et al.  Accordion summarization for end-game browsing on PDAs and cellular phones , 2001, CHI.

[8]  Fuad Rahman,et al.  Automatic summarization of Web content to smaller display devices , 2001, Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[9]  Andreas Paepcke,et al.  Seeing the whole in parts: text summarization for web browsing on handheld devices , 2001, WWW '01.

[10]  HongJiang Zhang,et al.  HTML page analysis based on visual cues , 2001, Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[11]  Baoyao Zhou,et al.  Function-based object model towards website adaptation , 2001, WWW '01.

[12]  Wei-Ying Ma,et al.  Visual Based Content Understanding towards Web Adaptation , 2002, AH.

[13]  Yalin Wang,et al.  A machine learning based approach for table detection on the web , 2002, WWW '02.