Adapting Web Page Tables on Mobile Devices

2. Related Work

Displaying the Web pages on small screen devices such as PDAs and mobile devices has been discussed and analyzed through different methodologies and approaches. In each case, the goal is to effectively manage and organize the Web pages for displaying on the small screen devices. Methods employed include using a special browser or summarizing the Web pages (Buyukkokten, Garcia-Molina, & Paepcke, 2001a). Suggested approaches for viewing and summarizing Web pages and HTML forms include the Power browser, End-game browsing and tree structures (Buyukkokten et al., 2002; Buyukkokten, Garcia-Molina, & Paepcke, 2001b). In our work we present a new approach in which the table row-column headings are in list format and have anchor tags used for navigating the actual contents of the table. The table format was restructured into a tree format that displays the actual table contents in the same page or in a different page.

The special browser developed at the Stanford’s digital library is used to access the Web pages from PDAs and mobile devices. The Power browser (Buyukkokten et al., 2000) uses a different approach to view the Web pages; it displays an entire page and just links the anchor tags of pages to be displayed. The Power Browser only shows the links that are contained in each page. The idea of displaying the table column headings as the links that point to the actual table contents has evolved from the Power browser implementation. This idea of implementing the table header links that point to the corresponding content of the table eventually reduces the navigation time as well as the scrolling.