Author(s)

W. Chang & R. Kelly

Abstract

The variation among mobile devices has led to various approaches for the presentation of data. In general, these approaches work well when a specialized application is developed for a given device, but do not work as well when generally available web pages are used as the source. Various approaches have been proposed and used for the display of web pages, most recently the proposal for HTML Mobile Profile. The evolution and implementation of this standard have opened the possibility of near-universal support for mobile device web display through conversion of web pages into a form consistent with HTML Mobile Profile. RIML, a markup language developed by the Consensus project took a major step in this direction with a system that includes an enhanced markup language, a database of device characteristics, and a translation engine. It introduced a rich set of mapping concepts, but the extensions to HTML make it unrealistic to reach widespread implementation. Our approach is similar to the approach of Consensus, but instead uses existing HTML syntax to provide translation pragma. The pragma defined in the HTML guides translation engine that breaks the page into a deck-of-cards, with the appropriate links between cards. We approach the problem of transforming existing web pages into wireless content by dividing it into three separate problems: the conversion of unstructured or invalid web pages into valid pages (XHTML), the transformation of valid pages into a markup suitable for mobile devices (XHTML-MP), and finally, the formatting of the resulting documents such that they are suitable for display on wireless devices. The pragma specified in the HTML guides these steps, particularly the formatting of the document wireless display. Keywords: XHTML, HTML, XSLT, WML, mobile devices, mobile profile, wireless web, deck of cards, content adaptation, automatic pagination.

Keywords

XHTML, HTML, XSLT, WML, mobile devices, mobile profile, wireless web, deck of cards, content adaptation, automatic pagination.