Mobile web: web manipulation for small displays using multi-level hierarchy page segmentation

• Authors: Aditya Gupta;Anuj Kumar; Mayank;V. N. Tripathi;S. Tapaswi
• Venue: Mobility '07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology
• Year: 2007

Mobile devices have made the world a small place. They are also being used widely, 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. With the enormous increase in mobile users since last decade, to such an extent that it even exceeds the number of desktop users in many developing countries, it becomes crucial to design systems for Web Manipulation, there by providing easier and greater accessibility and device independence. In this paper, we propose a new browsing technique to facilitate efficient web access and provide a better user experience on a device with rather small screen as compared to the usual desktop. It also proposes a novel technique to handle multimedia content, especially the images and video on a web page. In order to solve the problem of incomplete tags in HTML, an equivalent XML is generated for the desired webpage. For efficient browsing, the web page is represented as a multi level hierarchy, with the index of major sections on the first level and the sections indexed again in to sub-sections on the second level and so on, until we reach sub-sections that can be represented as sub-pages that fit in the small screen. We also propose an efficient algorithm for navigating through the sub-pages, thereby providing better user experience. The proposed technique provides better and efficient web browsing on mobile small displays up to user satisfaction.