0018-9162/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE October 2002 37 Web Interaction Using Very Small Internet Devices M ost computer users interact with the Internet from a desktop or laptop com- puter running a Web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. Inter- action typically involves downloading and viewing documents that include content as well as links to Adobe PDFs, audio, video, Microsoft Office, and other HTML documents. Users tend to view content and links together, rapidly alternating between reading content and following links. When a user clicks on a link to a non-HTML document, the browser invokes a client-side plug-in applica- tion to display the linked content and in some cases lets the user manipulate it. Because this traditional Web browser interaction model evolved on desktop computers, its user inter- face, hardware, and networking assumptions are uniquely suited to a desktop or laptop machine. In contrast, Internet-enabled cell phones, or “phone- tops,” typically accommodate only three to 12 text lines, and their design emphasizes portability and features such as battery life, audio clarity, and ease of selecting names from a phone book. Web inter- action has, so far, been a secondary concern. In some countries where cell-phone-based Inter- net users come close to outnumbering their desk- top counterparts, many content providers create new content for very small displays. Yet overall, most Web content providers are neither equipped nor have the desire to do this tailoring, so hand- crafted pages for phonetops represent only a frac- tion of the pages available to desktop users. For the most part, automated techniques to address the feature gap between desktop and phonetop rely on the notion of transducing—trans- lating HTML and images into formats compatible with small devices, which typically cannot handle HTML content. The “Fitting Desktop Content in a Small Display” sidebar describes fitting techniques in transducing and three other categories: scaling, manual authoring, and transforming. Of the four techniques, transforming has the most potential for widespread use because, in the ideal case, it closely resembles professional content tailoring to a particular device yet without the man- ual overhead. A transforming system modifies both the content and the structure, or experience, of interacting with the content, as well as transducing Squeezing desktop Web content into smart phones and text pagers is more practical with separate interfaces for navigation and content manipulation. m-Links, a middleware proxy system, supports this dual-mode browsing, offering mobile users a range of actions on any Web link. Bill N. Schilit Intel Research Jonathan Trevor David M. Hilbert FX Palo Alto Laboratory Tzu Khiau Koh Xerox Singapore COVER FEATURE