Introduction and Motivation

Years ago, when the Internet was a network almost only used by academics or militaries on their Desktop-PCs, its main purpose was the fast (and hopefully secure) exchange of information. Nowadays, this media has entered the households of millions of people and new (wireless) non-PC devices with web-access have become very popular. The focus, however, has remained on the exchange of information.

One of the most important remaining challenges is to present the information in the World Wide Web in a way, so that anyone can use it anytime, anywhere.

The language of the web, HTML, the HyperText-Markup-Language[2], has discovered some disadvantages, mostly because it has been developed from a view- and not content-oriented point of view, and its ''loose'' standard (which allows malformed markup).

This, and the lack of semantic information (exception: meta-tags), make HTML-pages not really easy to be further processed by non-human users. Additionally, these documents were meant to be interpreted by browsers running on desktop-PCs, usually equipped with large screens and ''mighty'' input devices such as mice or keyboards.

Therefore, HTML is not a device independent language - if one wishes to display web pages (written in HTML) properly on a wireless device, she will either have to enhance the mobile browser (which is often difficult, due to the possible lack of resources), invent a completely new language for the Wireless World Wide Web (such as the Wireless Markup Language, WML[3]) and redefine the existing pages in this language (so that essential functions may still be available to a mobile user), or - and this is the core of our work - convert these documents from their way from the web server to the client's user-agent (a browser, in the most cases).

root 2006-05-22