1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to accessing to information over the Internet. In particular, the present invention relates to a customized access to information over the Internet by various internet appliances with various processing capabilities.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
As the Internet has become a preferred medium for information access and dissemination, many different devices (e.g., mobile phones, personal digital assistants and handheld computers) can now be used to access information on the Internet. In general, these devices typically have much lesser text and graphical processing capabilities than a conventional desktop computer. (For convenience, in the remainder of this description, these devices are collectively referred to as “internet appliances”.) As much of the information on the Internet is organized for access by a desktop computer using a hypertext protocol (e.g., http), access to such information by a device other than a desktop computer can be inefficient. For example, many web pages are designed with a high-resolution graphical display in mind. Even when possible, accessing such web pages from a mobile telephone without a graphical display and providing only a limited number of short lines for text display can be a very frustrating experience.
To accommodate the different capabilities of the internet appliances, in the prior art, an operator of a website typically provides for each supported internet appliance a specialized “edition” of the website accessible through a specialized gateway. For example, since the current generation of mobile telephones are typically only capable of displaying text of a small number of characters per line, an operator would provide specially designed text-only “stripped down” web pages accessible through a wireless access protocol (WAP) gateway. In most instances, information available in the general edition of the web pages are included or excluded by the designer or operator based on its resource availability or other criteria, without user participation. Often, therefore, information important to some users is arbitrarily excluded, thereby severely reducing the utility of the web pages.
Where a specialized website is not available, the gateway would provide only the text from the web pages and discard or ignore graphical information, animation or other functions embedded in the web pages. In such an instance, no attempt is typically made to filter the information based on the content of a web page. Consequently, a relatively small web page can result in the user pressing the “scroll” key a large number of times. Many users therefore do not consider internet appliances to be suitable for serious information retrieval purposes.