A Web Page Splitting Method for Adaptive Browsing on Small Screen Devices

K. Karasawa, M. Okamoto, and H. Yamamoto (Japan)

Keywords

Web document, Layout analysis, Reflowing, Mobile Device

Abstract

This paper describes a method of web page splitting for browsing web pages designed for PC on a mobile device with a small screen. Because screens of mobile devices such as cellular phones are small, browsing web pages designed for PC on those devices often causes repeated scrolls, continual line breaks, etc. Several methods for analysis and splitting of web pages have been proposed. They tried to extract the semantic structure or author’s intent of web pages from HTLM tags or layout structures to produce the best splitting results. However, there are some cases where split blocks based on semantics or author’s intent are not fit to the size of a screen device. Our method puts more weight on sizes and readability of split blocks rather than consistency of semantics or author's intent in splitting web pages. The suitability of split blocks for a given device is represented by some statistical features on their shapes and contents which reflect user’s preference or tendency in browsing web pages. The best splitting of a web page into blocks is selected by two-dimensional DP (Dynamic Programming) over all combination of block candidates. Our method can be used for adaptive browsing of web pages on small screen devices.

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