An On-the---Flight Proxy System for Multi-format Web Content Transcoding for Mobile Devices

One of the trends in current information society is the visualization of Web sites using mobile devices. At present time, there are millions of mobile devices that are used by the owner to navigate in the web. However, not all the information placed in the web is appropriately adapted to be visualized in mobile devices. As a result, not all functionalities can be exploded by the users. To solve this situation, we need mechanisms to allow users of mobile devices to visualize Web sites independently if the Web sites were specifically designed or not for these types of devices. The problem of this scenario is that the contents of the Web site need to be adapted to the limitations of each mobile device. In this paper, an on-the-flight Web content transcoding mechanism is presented as solution to this problem. The mechanism proposes the inclusion of a new HTTP header in the HTTP package to describe a transcoding format command. This header is generated by a client-side Proxy named GAP, which runs on mobile devices with Windows CE operating system (Pocket PC, Smartphone, among others). The transcoding header is interpreted by a server-side Proxy, named GAT MT, that converts Web documents to WML, XHTML-MP, PDF, plain text, PostScript, XML and HTML adapted for mobile devices. To do this, the mechanism uses XSL technologies (XSLT and XSL-FO) to define Stylesheets according to a specific device.