Interactive scaling control mechanism for World-Wide Web systems

WWW latency can be reduced by scaling down of large-sized objects such as images and video. Thus, WWW object scaling systems need to provide useful user interface in order to take advantage of the latency reduction. This paper proposes VSCM (Virtual URL-based Scaling Control Mechanism) to provide user interface for flexible scaling control. VSCM controls scaling of WWW objects at proxy servers. The user interface based on VSCM enables a user to choose desired quality and size of the objects interactively. VSCM works with any server and any browser using standard HTTP and HTML. Furthermore, VSCM is applicable not only to object scaling, but to any object transformation with flexible navigation of the WWW.