Experiment on and analysis of mobile content transformation using XSLT

Abstract

AbstractMuch attention is being paid to the services that are accessed via the Internet from mobile phones and PDAs. For such mobile Internet services, the WAP Forum issued the WAP 2.0 standard based on IETF/W3C standards. WAP 2.0 adopted the subset of eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standardized by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as its markup language. The i‐mode service in Japan was launched in February 1999, and has acquired over 40 million users, as of January 2004. The markup language adopted in the i‐mode service is called i‐mode HTML, and was designed around Compact HTML. To ease the migration from i‐mode HTML to the WAP 2.0 markup language, the functional compatibility of the languages should be assured. To this end, we proposed functions unique to i‐mode HTML to the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum accepted all of our proposals. For making the migration more cost‐effective, software tools that support the transformation of i‐mode HTML content to the WAP 2.0 equivalents must be established. There are two approaches to content transformation: software‐based and rule‐based. Since the software‐based approach has some drawbacks such as a lack of extensibility and a lack of accountability, we have taken the rule‐based approach. We focused on eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) as the content transformation technique, because XSLT has been standardized by W3C for rule‐based transformation between XML contents. To technically verify the applicability of XSLT for content transformation from i‐mode HTML to the WAP 2.0 markup language, we performed an extensive XSLT transformation experiment using existing i‐mode service contents. In this paper, we describe content transformation using XSLT, overview the content transformation system, and analyze the results of the content transformation experiment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.