The limited display size of current small Internet devices is becoming a serious obstacle to information access. In this paper,
we introduce a Document REpresentation for Scalable Structures (DRESS) to help information providers make composite documents,
typically web pages, scalable in both logic and layout structure to support effective information acquisition in heterogeneous
environments. Through this novel document representation structure based on binary slicing trees, the document can dynamically
adapt its presentation according to display sizes by maximizing the information throughput to users. We discuss the details
of this structure with its key attributes. An automatic approach for generating this structure for existing web pages is also
presented. A branch-and-bound algorithm and a capacity ratio-based slicing method are proposed to select proper content representation
and aesthetic document layouts respectively. A set of user study experiments have been carried out and the results show that
compared with the thumbnail-based approach, the DRESS-based interface can reduce browsing time by 23.5%.
Keywords Web browsing - Adaptive content delivery - Slicing tree - Mobile device - Layout optimization
This work was performed when the second and the third authors were visiting students at Microsoft Research Asia.