Tree Adapt: Web Content Adaptation for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile web browsing usually becomes time-consuming 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 tim