1.1 Preface
Today, building a mobile Web application is much easier then before. Take the ASP.NET mobile controls [18] (formerly known as MMIT, short for the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit) for example, it reduces the work required for developers to develop applications that target different types of mobile devices, like mobile phones and PDAs. At runtime, MMIT will automatically detect the target device and return the proper presentation format. Thus the developers can focus on the application logic without worrying about the presentation issues.
Similar academic researches on this topic include [31] and [32]. Both of them provide plug-ins for famous IDEs, such as JBuilder and Visual Studio .NET respectively, to let developers author a single generic application. Accompany with the PUML transformation technology [30], this generic application can be further transformed into specific target formats for different mobile devices.
1.2 Motivation
It is not uncommon to browse Web pages via mobile devices because of their popularity today. However, most Web pages were mainly designed for desktop computers that equipped with big screens. When browsing in the mobile devices, a user might have to scroll up and down, left and right all the time to find the information they want simply because of the limited visible area, which is really not
user-friendly at all.
Fortunately, some famous websites have another simplified version of Web content specially provided for mobile devices, such as Google Mobile [25] and Yahoo Mobile [26]. On the other hand, it is a heavy burden on Web developers, however, to craft and maintain multiple versions of the same website, even with the help of the fascinating toolkits mentioned in the previous section.
In this research, we propose a system that is designed to help users personalize Web pages for handheld device browsing.
1.3 Research Objectives
In this section, four major research objectives are listed and introduced briefly.
Easy-to-use
It doesn’t make sense to launch another program other then the browser to personalize a Web page. When a user surfs on the Internet and finds a Web page that interests him/her, the configuration tool of this system should be able to pop up in the browser window somehow right away. Moreover, all the code needed to accomplish this job (i.e. personalize Web pages) should be downloaded on the fly when accessed, and thus allow a user to work on different computers at different places.
Personalizing Web Pages Visually
Web pages are usually composed of header, footer, sidebar, and content areas [34].
Parts of them are used to maintain a consistent style for the website, and parts are
used for navigation. Some renowned websites may even contain a lot of advertisements in it. Perhaps only some information is really needed to be shown on the mobile phone screen. This research also aims at allowing a user to determine which parts of a Web Page to retain while browsing this page through mobile devices.
A friendly user interface thus should be available for a user to do that work. For example, with appropriate visual aids (such as highlight) a user can choose blocks in a Web page one by one with different granularity. Through drag-and-drop, a user can determine the relative position of those chosen blocks according his/her personal preferences. In short, a user can re-construct a Web page simply with visual manipulations, and doesn’t have to write any line of code.
Support for Mainstream Browsers
Figure 1-1: Browser Market Share for April, 2006
According the browser market share survey [29] (Figure 1-1), Microsoft Internet Explorer is still far and away the most dominant browser on the Web, with 83.88 % usage market share, and Firefox has increased its share to 10.68%, and the other alternatives, such as Safari, Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla, occupy the remaining
share.
The downloaded mobile code should work with at least the top two popular browsers, i.e. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browser.
Reducing Wireless Bandwidth Consumption
More than screens size constraints, the limited memory and wireless network bandwidth also make it unsuitable to deliver the entire Web page untouched to mobile devices. Before returning a Web page to mobile devices, some action must be taken to pre-process a Web page according to a user’s preferences, so that the volume of data transmission to mobile phone could be reduced, and thus reduce the wireless bandwidth consumption as well.
1.4 Research Contribution
In order to achieve the objectives mentioned in Section 1.3, we have encountered many difficulties during implementation. This thesis discusses those problems encountered and our corresponding solutions. The major contributions of this research are listed below:
1. A cross-browser configuration tool is designed and implemented.
2. The Web-based nature of our configuration tool allows a user to configure the settings from different computers, and requires no pre-installation of any software
3. Blocks in a Web page can be chosen correctly, under the premise that the layout of a Web page doesn’t change frequently.
4. A Web-based management interface is provided.
1.5 Outline of the Thesis
This dissertation is divided into six chapters. Following is a brief description of the content of each chapter:
1. In Chapter 2, the background of developing this system and the related work including some commercial products and academic efforts are introduced.
2. In Chapter 3, an overview of the proposed system and its three major components are given.
3. In Chapter 4, the implementation details, problems encountered, and our corresponding solutions are illustrated.
4. In Chapter 5, some tests are conducted to evaluate our system. Besides a practical example showing how to make use of the proposed tool to eliminate unnecessary scrolling is also presented.
5. In Chapter 6, we dwell on conclusion and future work for referencing.