SmartView: Flexible Viewing of Web Page Contents

SmartView is a functionality built into a document viewer that performs partitioning of an HTML document content into logical sections that can further be selected by the user and viewed independently from the rest of the document. The SmartView interface enforces the concept of a document by allowing the user to view both the document overview (e.g., a zoomed out version of the document, a document thumbnail(s), etc.) and a detailed view of the selected section of the document. The layout of the detailed view is modified to achieve the presentation that is desired by the user or is optimal for a device. The SmartView functionality is essential in cases when the document layout is optimized for displays of certain size but need to be viewed on smaller devices — a situation that requires significant document scaling and layout changes (e.g., viewing of Web pages on PDAs). It is equally important in instances when only a portion of a document needs to be displayed (e.g., showing a section of a Web page on a large screen). The current implementation of SmartView is compatible with the Microsoft Internet Explorer v.6.0.