Patent Application
20070011603
The present invention relates to browsing of documents on a small display.
Portable wireless devices such as mobile phones have become miniaturized during the past decade, and this continuing miniaturization is bounded mainly by the perceptual limits of the human beings who use the devices. Therefore, mobile devices increasingly have comparatively large display areas relative to the rest of the device. The need for small displays presents especially severe problems for hand-held devices that are used for displaying pages from the World Wide Web (WWW), because WWW pages are typically designed for display on desktop screens.
Viewing web pages on a small display normally requires horizontal and vertical scrolling with scroll bars, which is a technique that is generally experienced as uncomfortable or even annoying for users. Consequently, most browsers that are installed in hand-held devices to interpret web page content offer the possibility of viewing web pages in a format that is optimized for the display dimensions of the hand-held device. This is usually achieved by rendering the web page so that it fits the width of the device's display.
Rendering a page so that it fits the width of the device's display causes several problems. For example, rendered pages get very tall, so a lot of vertical scrolling is required. Also, the structure of the web page is often not preserved well by the rendering process, and thus elements such as input fields frequently get separated far away from each other on the display. Moreover, an original layout mode is typically required as an additional viewing method, because some pages do not convert usably into tall and narrow format, and those pages must therefore be viewed the old-fashioned way, with all of the old-fashioned problems.
Consequently, browsing of large web pages on small displays can present difficult problems for the user of a mobile device. Many web-page-viewing solutions developed for small displays initially zoom the web page to fit into the display width, and then divide the page into sections. As these sections may be very small, their content can be difficult for the user to see. One of these methods is described in another application by the present inventor, titled “IMPROVED PRESENTATION OF LARGE PAGES ON SMALL DISPLAYS” (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/820,442) which is incorporated herein by reference, for purposes of background. According to that application, the web page is initially zoomed to horizontally fit to the display, and then the web page is divided into small sections from which the user can select the section that he or she wants to view. Unfortunately, when a large page is zoomed to the display width and divided into sections, the display sections get very small, and it can be difficult to see the information they contain, which makes selecting the correct section very difficult. That application furthermore contains information about showing different sections at the same time in the same or different size(s), which is also discussed in the application titled “USER-DEFINED CHANGING OF PAGE REPRESENTATIONS” (PCT/IB2005/001274) hereby incorporated herein by reference for purposes of background.
Another area where similar problems occur is the use of a miniature view for navigation help; the page may be shown in a large presentation on the screen, and then—either automatically or upon user's request—a smaller size presentation of the web page can be shown. The small size representation can be shown either separately from the large representation, or fully/partially on top of the large representation, or instead of the large representation. The user can then move focus to a certain part of the page in this small size representation, and the large size representation scrolls accordingly. One example of this kind of web page viewing method is described in the document titled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR VIEWING DIGITAL VISUAL CONTENT ON A DEVICE” (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/007,028) which is incorporated herein by reference for purposes of background.
The present invention involves automatically generating “tooltips,” which summarize the content of a web page section, in a floating window on top of the original content. The text for a tooltip can be taken from the contents of each web page section. The types of section content summarized by a tooltip may include header elements, large or bolded text, form labels, and/or initial text. Additionally, tooltips containing keywords from a focused section can be shown. The browser can also generate text for tooltips from the source code of the document, or from linked external objects of the document.
Tooltips can be shown immediately, or after the cursor or focus has stayed on a section for a while. Tooltips can also be hidden after having been shown temporarily. If the user has executed a keyword search on a page, then tooltips can show the number of hits inside a focused section, and/or tooltips can show some text around found keywords (a bit like GOOGLE generates text on its search results page).
Tooltips may only contain plain text, or they can also show content formatted as it is on a page, and tooltips could even contain graphics to give the user an even better view of key content in a section of a web page or other document.
Content generated for tooltips could also be used for giving audio feedback to the user; the device could for instance read aloud the text generated for a tooltip, when focus has stayed on a section for a while.
The method, system, device, and software product of the present invention are thus for describing to a user a section of a page on a small display, such as a mobile phone display that displays a web page. A section selection signal indicates a section of the page, and then a tooltip describes content of that section of the page. The tooltip is superimposed on at least part of the page, and then a larger version of that section of the page can be displayed.
Regarding the use of a miniature view for navigation help, it may be difficult to accurately see things from the small size representation, and therefore tooltips can be shown according to the section on top of which the cursor is shown. In this navigation method, the cursor does not necessarily move from section to section but may be “freely” movable to any part of the page, and the cursor usually is a rectangle indicating the part of the page shown in large scale representation, the cursor may be on top of multiple sections, in which case tooltips may be shown for all covered sections, or for instance for section located in the center point of the cursor or for the section which occupies the largest part of the cursor rectangle.
According to an illustrative embodiment of the present invention, the text for a section's tooltip is taken from that section's contents, and this process of creating the tooltip from the section's contents can advantageously be prioritized as follows.
1) Header elements of a section;
2) Biggest text lines or words (such as font size and bolding) raise priority;
3) For a section that contains a form, the field labels get high priority;
4) First text of a section gets higher priority than later text.
In case there is too much high-priority information to fit in the space allotted for a tooltip, only the highest priority items would be included.
Another high priority item for creating tooltips are alt-texts of images and objects. Alt-text stands for “alternative text,” and this alt-text is typically placed in the code for an image in an HTML page, as an alternative to viewing the actual image. It appears before the image is fully loaded, or if a web page visitor has their graphics turned off, or if the web page visitor positions the mouse on the image.
Text for tooltips can also be taken from external objects, like keywords from a Macromedia Flash object. Tooltip text could furthermore vary depending upon the status of content; for instance if a section only contains a Macromedia Flash object that is currently being downloaded, texts from its “standby” attribute could be shown in the section's tooltip until the object has been loaded.
If a section mostly contains links (for instance if over 50% of its content is links, and there are more that 10 links), then the beginning of a tooltip can include the word text “Links” (or an image representing links) followed by texts of the links, separated by commas.
If an item for a tooltip would require more than one line, it can be truncated to fit to one line. A tooltip's text can also be defined by the page author, for example with some particular attribute or identifier. Tooltip texts can be generated in the client (e.g. the user device), but they could additionally or alternatively be generated by a content optimization server in the network.
Referring now to
Turning now to
Once the user has found a section having a tooltip description of interest, the user will then indicate that interest and the mobile device will thus receive 225 a section display signal. Consequently, a larger version of that section will be displayed 230. The larger version of that section may be displayed alone, or together with other sections. The other sections may all be shown as smaller versions, all be shown as larger versions, or in any other combination (for instance 2 sections as smaller versions, 3 as medium size versions and 2 as larger versions) Each section of the page may have a tooltip (“may have”, because there can for instance be empty sections for which a tooltip may be empty), and substantially every point of the web page is part of a corresponding section.
Pointing to the section of interest with the cursor is not the only way for the user to indicate interest in a section and so triggering a tooltip. For instance, a tooltip may also be shown for a section(s) that is shown in a certain position (e.g. in the center) on the display or the like.
A tooltip may comprise simply a textual summary of the section, containing prioritized information about the section, including header elements in the section, larger or bolded text in the section, labels of a form in the section, initial text in the section, and/or keywords in the section. If the page is searched for a search term, then each tooltip can also contain search hit information. It is possible for only one tooltip to be shown at a time, although it is also possible to show more than one, such as by showing the tooltip for a section of interest as well as the tooltips for the immediately adjacent sections.
It is also possible to automatically show tooltips for the most relevant section(s), for instance after loading the page or after the user has requested it. Relevancy of a section may simply be determined by content of a section; for instance, the amount of text in a section may be used to determine the relevancy. Or there can be a system that can track and store information about the user's behavior on different pages; then relevancy may be determined for instance by which section(s) on that page the user has viewed most often during the previous visits to that page/site. The tooltip may also indicate to the user whether the section of interest has significantly changed after the last visit to that page. Or, content of sections may be automatically checked during loading of the page, and tooltips can be automatically shown for section(s) that have significantly changed since the last visit. In addition/alternatively to indicating changes with tooltips, changed section(s) can also be shown with some other indication that indicates that they have been changed, for instance they can be shown with a bit different coloring than other section(s) or with some additional icon, as discussed in the related invention report “USER-DEFINED CHANGING OF PAGE REPRESENTATIONS” (already mentioned above) which contains more information about tracking/storing user's behavior on pages.
Turning now to
According to this embodiment of the mobile device, the user input device 313 is also for providing a section display signal 340, when the user decides which section he or she wants to enlarge. The processing unit 330 is then responsive to the section display signal 340, and provides a zoom signal 345. The display 310 is responsive to the zoom signal 345, and is for displaying a larger version of the section of the page.
Turning now to
The present invention is adaptable to other document types beyond web pages, and thus it is likely that tooltips can enhance viewing of MICROSOFT POWER POINT and ADOBE PDF documents. It is also to be understood that all of the present figures, and the accompanying narrative discussions of best mode embodiments, do not purport to be completely rigorous treatments of the method, system, network element, and software product under consideration. A person skilled in the art will understand that the steps and signals of the present application represent general cause-and-effect relationships that do not exclude intermediate interactions of various types, and will further understand that the various steps and structures described in this application can be implemented by a variety of different sequences and configurations, using various different combinations of hardware and software which need not be further detailed herein.
It should also be noted that the present invention could be applied to 3D, if for instance a 3D Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) document can be divided into cubes, and when the user moves focus onto a cube then a tooltip shows the contents of that cube. The tooltip itself may also be in 3D, and can be in any location (in front, behind, in the middle) with respect to an object/document. Therefore, everything mentioned in this patent application can apply to 3D also.
