I. INTRODUCTION
With an explosive growth in the number of people seeking to manage their business on their mobile devices,
web pages suitable for viewing on mobile devices need to be provided by organizations that seek to benefit from the ever increasing mobile market.
Most of today’s web pages are only designed for viewing on desktops and laptops with large screens and considerable
memory and CPU. These pages typically use multi-column layouts and are formatted fit on pages with fixed widths.
Processing and downloading time are rarely a problem for desktops and laptops with rich memory resources and sufficient Internet bandwidth. In fact, irrelevant content, such as advertisements, are often acceptable by desktop and
laptop users because the screens are large enough that such advertisements do not overly distract such users from the
content of the web page. However, if the same web page is displayed on a mobile device screen without being tailored to
the small screen, users are forced to scroll the window manually in order to position the window properly for
finding content of interest. This inconvenience seriously diminishes the usefulness of mobile devices in web
browsing, as well as the value of the website to the mobile user.
While having web pages tuned for viewing on mobile devices is essential, companies do not have IT resources to
spare that can manually develop and maintain separate web pages specifically for mobile access. Effective techniques
that can ease the burden of developing mobile web pages are of great value. According to Machay et al. [2], three standard categories of methods exist for web page transformation:
• Direct Migration – No transformation is made to a web page. Users are required to navigate using both vertical and horizontal scrolling. This can be considered as the “default” solution.
• Linear Transformation – The layout of a web page is changed to a linear list, which fits within the width of a small screen. The main benefit of this approach is the elimination of horizontal scrolling.
• Overview Transformation – An overview of the original web page that then links to pages with
content. However, this decreases readability.
In most mobile web page generation solutions, the above three techniques are used in combination with newly introduced techniques, such as machine learning and computer vision techniques, to generate mobile version web pages automatically. Mobile web browsers also employ simple manual interventions at run-time. For instance, the Opera [3] mobile browser provides options to turn on and off features such as word wrap and column view when browsing on small screen devices.
This paper presents a mobilizer architecture and process that rather than completely automating, brings the human
into the conversion loop and assists him in deciding which web-page components should be presented in the mobile
versions of the web page. The mobilizer assists the human by extracting the component hierarchy of a web page using web crawler techniques, analyzing the structure of the page, and then converting it to the mobile version using a combination of techniques that include link analysis, ranking algorithms based on component content, and interactive removal of irrelevant content. This approach has proved successful; the mobilizer is now in limited production use within a
commercial partner, and we expect full production use in the near term.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Related work concerning web page optimization on mobile devices is presented in Section 2. In Section 3, we introduce our “customizable component” solution and its architecture. In Section 4, we describe the techniques used in our approach. Section 5 discusses the results of customizable component
solution, and compares to other solutions. Future work is discussed in Section 6.