In recent years we have seen the explosive growth of small Internet devices such as handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones that have been used to leverage the capabilities of the Web and provided users with ubiquitous access to information than ever before. Despite the proliferation of these devices, their usage for accessing the Web today is still largely constraint by their small form factors such as small screen. Because most of today’s web page has been designed with the desktop computer in mind, and is often too large to fit into the small screen of a mobile device. Web browsing on such small devices is like seeing a mountain in a distance from a telescope. It requires the user to manually scroll the window to find the content of interest and position the window properly for reading information. This tedious and time-consuming process has largely limited the usefulness of these devices.
In order to improve the browsing experience, various adaptation methods have been proposed to modify web contents to meet the requirement of client capability and network bandwidth. For instance, methods were proposed for distilling web objects to reduce the consumption of network bandwidth and client computation. For web pages, the existing methods are mostly based on discarding format information. While this mainly focuses on reducing resource consumption, there are still many works on beautifying the web page representation on small form factor devices. In another approach, the web page is reformatted on the basis of page annotation. However, this approach requires a practical solution to facilitate the creation of annotations for existing web pages. The re-authoring technique required web pages to have sections and section headers, which however, are rarely used in web page authoring today. A different method suggests the generation of an accordion representation where the detail content can be folded or unfolded at client device. Since this method focuses on text summarization, it does not leverage the graphic capabilities of current devices.