Attenuator: towards preserving the original appearance of large documents when rendered on small screen mobile devices

Although compact mobile devices are convenient and have many advantages, their small screens can present problems. A significant proportion of HTML documents are optimally designed to look best when rendered on high-resolution displays of desktop and laptop computers - not small screen mobile devices. Transcoding solutions exist that can intercept HTML pages and transform them for small screen devices, but as consequence the original visual layout and structure of the page is barely recognizable. Described in this paper is the mobile page attenuator, a proxy-based framework that preserves the view of the document as it was originally intended for the desktop in a form renderable on a small screen device. A scheme for region-based interactivity is also introduced, further ameliorating the need for excessive scrolling in either direction.