Multi-Style Web Content Restructuring for Efficient Mobile Web Browsing
Abstract
Mobile devices such as smart phones, PDAs, and tablets are getting more and more popular every day. As a result, more people tend to use mobile devices to access Web contents. Therefore, mobile browsing becomes an important means of Internet access for daily life. In order to have smooth and user-friendly Web browsing experiences, Web designers should consider the limitations of mobile devices, such as a small screen size. However, most Web sites do not provide a mobile version, which makes it difficult to browse the contents on the small screens of mobile devices. This study presents a novel approach that restructures the important information from a full Web page to fit for mobile browsing. Unlike existing adaptation approaches, my work supports user customization on the information restructuring. In other words, the adaption engine can restructure information according to a user's personal favors. My approach consists of two sub-systems. The first sub-system is responsible to discover the organization of information underlying a Web page, and the second sub-system receives the structured information and uses a user-friendly interface to present the information. My approach also provides users with some customization options in order to improve the user experience. The first sub-system is out of the scope of this paper. This paper mainly focuses on the second sub-system. In order to produce a user-friendly interface, firstly I analyzed existing mobile Web sites, which are specifically designed for mobile devices. In this analysis, I summarized the patterns and the functionalities of these mobile sites in order to customize the design to support a wide range of different Web pages. For these purposes, I have designed an adaptive layout that the users can customize how the information will appear on the mobile device screen easily.