Adapting Web Page Tables on Mobile Devices

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

Web browsing using hand-held devices is becoming more common. But the relatively small display area of hand-held devices, compared to desktop computers, requires that Web pages designed for desktops are adapted to suit hand-held devices for convenient browsing. Web page adaptation techniques for hand-held devices takes into account device's screen size, limited bandwidth and input capabilities. Although several techniques have been proposed to adapt Web pages for smaller screen, each of them is better suited for specific scenarios and requirements. Hence a better understanding of the features and limitations of these techniques are required for successful development of Web pages for mobile devices. This paper presents a concise overview and comparative evaluation of the state-of-the-art of the techniques for adapting Web pages for hand-held devices.

Proceedings of the …, 2006

Abstract: The introduction of smartphones with their accompanying capacity to access the Internet, changed the way the Internet is used. Many people now use mobile devices to browse the Web. However, the varying screen sizes of these devices portend some impact on their users' experience, as the Web content on the devices vary in size and the navigation of pages are also different in the various devices. The advent of the responsive web design (RWD) philosophy, revolutionized the way Web pages are designed and the way they appear to the users in the various devices. RWD makes Web pages to adjust to the size of any devices' screen irrespective of the device type. In this study, the effect of responsive web design of the user experience witha laptop and smartphone devices while using the e-Ebola Awareness System, (a Web based health awareness portal for Ebola virus disease), was measured and evaluated. The results revealed that users had a better user experience with Smartphones than with laptops while using the system, however, for most of the metrics collected, users' experiences with the two device types were not significantly different at 95% level of confidence, implying that for those metrics, the responsive web design had a similar effect on the users' experiences and attitudes

International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science, 2014

Mobile web browsing usually becomes timeconsuming since currently it requires horizontal and vertical scrolling in addition to this, users interested in only a section of a web page are often burdened with cumbersome whole web pages that not only do not properly fit their mobile screens but also require a lot of delivery time. This problem can be addressed and resolved with the help of a mobile web content adaptation system. Existing web content adaptation systems focus on resizing contents to fit a mobile device and removing unnecessary contents from the adapted web page. This paper's aim is to address the gap by proposing the TreeAdapt which provides a condensed view of an adapted web page. This condensed view consists of only block headers which users can then expand for complete content. In order to achieve this, the proposed algorithm will first categorize an HTML object as menu, block title or the main content. A depth-first traversal algorithm is then used to select the sequence of blocks to be displayed on a mobile device. Usability studies were performed to evaluate the usability of the adapted contents against other deployed systems. Results from the usability studies indicate that the adapted contents produced by the proposed techniques enabled users to locate targeted information within a web page in a shorter span of time.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011

Mobile internet browsing usually involves a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling, which makes web browsing time-consuming and in addition to this user may be interested in a section of a webpage, which may not fit to the mobile screen. This requires more scrolling in both directions. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by displaying the block title and hide the block body contents from a large webpage while maintaining their semantics which display only the condensed information. Our proposed system, Flexiadaptor, reduces unnecessary information by allowing its users to see the most relevant blocks of the page and provides the block title. The Flexi-adaptor categorized each objects of the webpage as menu, block title and main content. Assign a weight to each object of the block by analyzing the objects elements. It uses depth first traversal algorithm to select blocks, and delivers them to handheld devices. The proposed solution improves web content accessibility and delivers the target contents to the users.

Proceedings of Human Factors in …, 2003

Viewing web pages on a small screen is a topical issue on mobile phones. PDA devices have provided access to the full web for a while, but recently web browsers have also become available for mobile phones. We conducted a study on how ordinary users perceive familiar web pages on the 176x208-pixel color display of a mobile phone. We used the commercial mobile browser that reformats web pages in a tall and narrow layout, using a server side proxy. We found that the users were delighted to have the web on a mobile phone and saw that narrow layout on a mobile phone is a surprisingly good way to view web pages. We also found some areas of improvement, such as providing the interesting content before the information that is often ignored on a large screen.

2003

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 subpages 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.

2019

Information in small packages 3 Perspectives Making the web more mobile Stéphane Boyera Feature 4 The mobile resource kit

Information Technologies in Organizations - Management and Applications of Multimedia, 2013

Originally the World Wide Web was just a space of interconnected pages with rather static content tailored for presentation on desktop computers. The last decade was a time of dynamic evolution of the World Wide Web, as it becomes an application platform and is accessed by more and more varied devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, etc.). The static content is replaced by interactive web applications that have to work properly on a growing number of web browsers. The migration from simple web pages to web applications should be easier thanks to the new features introduced in the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. However, these specifications are still not final and the support for different features varies among web browsers, which makes development of web applications, especially mobile web applications, a difficult task. In this chapter we present an analysis of a usefulness of new features introduced by HTML5 and CSS3 specifications for building internet applications for mobile devices and we provide some guidelines for web application developers.

ACM Transactions on the Web, 2013

Automatic layout of tables is required in online applications because of the need to tailor the layout to the viewport width, choice of font, and dynamic content. However, if the table contains text, minimizing the height of the table for a fixed maximum width is NP-hard. Thus, more efficient heuristic algorithms are required. We evaluate the HTML table layout recommendation and find that while it generally produces quite compact layout it is brittle and can lead to quite uncompact layout. We present an alternate heuristic algorithm. It uses a greedy strategy that starts from the widest reasonable layout and repeatedly chooses to narrow the column for which narrowing leads to the least increase in table height. The algorithm is simple, fast enough to be used in online applications, and gives significantly more compact layout than is obtained with HTML's recommended table layout algorithm.