Method and System for Providing Portions of Information Content to a Client Device

• US 20080201452A1
• Filed: 02/08/2008
• Published: 08/21/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 02/09/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: WSOU Investments, LLC (WSOU Holdings, LLC)
• Original Assignee: Novarra Incorporated (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Athas, Gregory J., Mitchell, Michael P., Bak, Pawel, Moreno, Cesar
• Granted Patent: US 9,524,353 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/219
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9577 Optimising the visualization of content, e.g. distillation of HTML documents
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 61/30 Managing network names, e.g. use of aliases or nicknames name-to-address mapping H04L61/45
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/56 Provisioning of proxy services store-and-forward switching systems in data switching networks H04L12/54
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/5651 Reducing the amount or size of exchanged application data

Abstract

A method and system for providing portions of information content to a client device is presented. The present application provides a manner of personalizing information content for display on handheld or mobile devices. A user may identify sections of a web page as clips, and then request only the identified section instead of the entire web page from a server. Upon receiving the request, the server will load the web page, retrieve the identified section, transform the identified section for display on the client device, and then send the transformed information to the client device. The clip of information is then a live update from a web page that presents the latest content from a web page instead of a cached web page section.

Claims

1. A method of providing information content for display comprising:

receiving at a server from a mobile device a request for less than all content in a web page, wherein the request includes an identification of the web page and information identifying a portion of the content in the web page;

retrieving a main document of the web page;

identifying within the main document of the web page the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request;

transforming the portion of content identified in the web page for viewing on the mobile device; and

sending the transformed portion of content to the mobile device.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

retrieving subdocuments included within the requested portion of the content of the main document;

transforming the subdocuments for viewing on the mobile device; and

sending the transformed subdocuments to the mobile device.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the transformed portion of content and the transformed subdocuments are sent to the mobile device together.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the subdocuments includes images.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the main document includes HTML of the web page.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving at the server from the mobile device a sub-request for subdocuments identified within the received transformed portion of content;

retrieving subdocuments included within the requested portion of the content of the main document;

transforming the subdocuments for viewing on the mobile device; and

sending the transformed subdocuments to the mobile device.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

retrieving all content in the web page; and

identifying the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying within the main document of the web page the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request comprises identifying textual content within the main document of the web page.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining characteristics of the mobile device, and

wherein transforming the portion of content identified in the web page for viewing on the mobile device comprises adapting the portion of content for display on the mobile device based on the characteristics of the mobile device.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein determining characteristics of the mobile device comprises:

receiving information identifying the mobile device within the request; and

accessing a database including characteristics of mobile devices to identify the characteristics of the mobile device.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page includes any of the following:

HTML tags, HTML tag names, HTML tag attributes, a storage size of the portion, or a viewing size of the portion.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein identifying within the main document of the web page the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request comprises:

searching content in the web page for a beginning HTML tag having a name as specified in the request; and

searching the content in the web page for an ending HTML tag that corresponds to the beginning HTML tag.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page includes an HTML tag identifier, and wherein identifying the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request comprises:

searching content in the web page for the HTML tag identifier;

searching the content in the web page for an ending HTML tag that corresponds to the HTML tag identifier.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising identifying a segment of the web page including information between the HTML tag identifier and the ending HTML tag as the portion of the content in the web page that is requested by the mobile device.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying within the main document of the web page the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request comprises searching for the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page within nested levels of the main document of less than four.

16. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving a selection from the mobile device indicating the portion of the content in the web page; and

creating an indicator that identifies the portion of the content in the web page, wherein the indicator is a uniform resource locator (URL) that includes the identification of the web page and the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein receiving from the mobile device the request for less than all content in the web page comprises receiving the indicator from the mobile device.

18. The method of claim 16, wherein the uniform resource locator (URL) is in the form of www.[uniform resource locator of the web page].com/[information identifying the portion of content in the web page].

19. The method of claim 1, wherein the transformed portion of content that is sent to the mobile device includes live updates from the web page.

20. The method of claim 1, wherein the web page includes multiple sections of information content where section boundaries are indicated by HTML elements, and wherein the portion of content in the web page requested by the mobile device corresponds to one of the sections of information.

21. A computer readable medium having stored thereon instructions for causing a processing unit to execute the method of claim 1.

22. The method of claim 1, wherein sending the transformed portion of content to the mobile device comprises accelerating data delivery to the mobile device.

23. The method of claim 1, further comprising inserting a uniform resource locator (URL) referring to the web page into the transformed portion of content, and then sending the transformed portion of content to the mobile device.

24. A server comprising:

a processor for receiving from a mobile device requests for less than all content in a web page, wherein the request includes an identification of the web page and information identifying a portion of the content in the web page;

memory including software applications executable by the processor, the software applications including;

a server browser for retrieving a main document of the web page from an information source;

a clip identifier for identifying within the main document the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request;

a content modification module for transforming the identified portion of the content in the web page for display on the mobile device; and

an interface for sending the transformed information content to the mobile device.

25. The server of claim 24, wherein the server browser identifies and presents a limited number of content candidates contained within the web page to the mobile device, and receives a request for at least one of the content candidates.

26. The server of claim 25, wherein the server browser uses HTML elements to delineate sections of the web page for clipping.

27. The server of claim 24, wherein a limited number of content candidates contained within the web page are manually identified and presented to the mobile device.

28. The server of claim 24, wherein the clip identifier sets a node matching the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page to be a beginning of the portion of content in the web page requested by the mobile device and sets a node after a corresponding ending HTML tag to be an ending of the portion of content in the web page requested by the mobile device.

29. The server of claim 24, wherein the clip identifier identifies the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request by:

searching content in the web page for a beginning HTML tag having a name as specified in the request; and

searching the content in the web page for an ending HTML tag that matches the beginning HTML tag.

30. The server of claim 24, wherein the information identifying the portion of the content in the web page includes an HTML tag identifier, and wherein the clip identifier identifies the portion of the content in the web page using the information provided in the request by:

searching content in the web page for the HTML tag identifier;

searching the content in the web page for an ending HTML tag that corresponds to the HTML tag identifier; and

identifying a segment of the web page indicated by information between the HTML tag identifier and the ending HTML tag as the portion of the content in the web page that is requested by the mobile device.