S60 Open to new features

For each web page you look at, how much do you actually read? Or use other than by reading? Sometimes only a fairly low percentage of a page is useful. The question, of course, is which part is useful.

Our browser works on a device where in many cases the content costs extra. If you have a phone with wifi and you’re in range of a hotspot, so much the better. But for the most part mobile users pay for the data. So it would be a benefit to users if the browser was clever enough to load only the right portion of a page.

It would not, of course, be a benefit to everyone. The network operators would get less data-transfer revenue. Pages with advertising support would get fewer “eyeballs” (well, assuming the ads aren’t the important portion of the page). Web designers would have another task as they designed for a browser that was going to load only parts of their pages. Users are my main concern, though.

There are some systems that already try to modify the page displayed on a mobile device, generally using a proxy server to “do something” to the content and send a smaller number of bits to the mobile user. Opera Mini, for example, is partly server-based and works pretty well. There have been (and are) other proxy-based solutions. So that particular part of the problem can be solved.

The harder problem is figuring out which parts of a given page are the important parts. It’s a hard problem because it depends on a lot of things. It’s not necessarily the biggest piece of text. It’s not necessarily the most prominent graphic element. It might be the portion of a page containing a form, but it might just as well be just the inverse; the part of the same page that doesn’t contain a form. Even assuming you could get it right for a particular set of pages in a given situation — news pages, for example, or blog pages, or photo pages — users differ. What’s important to one might be quite different from what’s important to another.

It might even vary over time. The part of page “x” important to me today might not be the same tomorrow. Worst of all, some pages really only work “unabridged”, as it were. The whole thing is important, and there’s no apparent range of priority; you just need the whole page.

I think this is still a solvable problem, even given all these constraints. Part of the answer lies in collaboration of the “page ranking” sort. Part of it lies in adaptability of the “smart menu” sort. Some other technologies will help, too.

The large question, of course, is whether all this effort to reduce the amount of data flowing to the mobile is, in the end, a good idea. Flat-rate data service would just simplify the whole thing, wouldn’t it?