【正文】 . EasytouseIt does not make sense to launch another program other than the browser to personalize a Web page. When a user surfs on the Internet and finds a Web page that interests him/her, the configuration tool of this system should be able to pop up in the browser window somehow right away. Moreover, all the codes needed to acplish this job (. personalize Web pages) should be downloaded on the fly when accessed, thus allowing a user to work on different puters at different places.. Personalizing Web pages visuallyWeb pages are usually posed of header, footer, sidebar, and content areas [7]. Parts of them are used to maintain a consistent style for the website, and other parts of them are used for navigation. Some renowned websites may even contain a lot of advertisements on it. In many Web pages, only a few of information is really needed to be shown on the mobile phone screen. This research also aims at allowing a user to determine which parts of a Web page should be retained while browsing this page with their mobile device.A friendly user interface should thus be available for a user to perform this task. For example, with appropriate visual aids (such as highlight), a user can choose blocks in a Web page one by one with different granularity. Through the operation of draganddrop, a user can determine the relative position of the chosen blocks according to his/her personal preferences. In short, a user can reconstruct a mobile Web page simply with visual manipulations, and does not have to write any line of code.According to the browser market share survey [8], Microsoft Internet Explorer is still by far the most dominant browser on the Web, with % usage market share, and Firefox has increased its share to %, with the other alternatives, such as Safari, Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla, occupying the remaining share.The downloaded mobile code should work with at least the top two popular browsers, . Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browser.. Reducing wireless bandwidth consumptionMore than screen size constraints, the limited memory and wireless network bandwidth also make it unsuitable for delivering the entire Web page untailored to mobile devices. Before returning a Web page to mobile devices, some adaptation must be taken to preprocess a Web page according to a user39。s browser when he/she is about to personalize a Web page. It provides some visual manipulations for users to help them specify their preferences about a Web page. The preferences here include: blocks of a Web page that should be retained and their final arrangement. All the preferences about this page would be saved in a remote database that is managed by Configuration Manager. Fig. 4 is a snapshot when executing Page Tailor in a Firefox Web browser.Fig. 4. Page Tailor in Firefox Web browser.. Execution and initializationWhen browsing Web pages, a user can click on the installed bookmarklet to download and execute Page Tailor. From the other perspective of users, it seems that the Web page itself provides the personalizing functions.After the Page Tailor window is launched in the user39。 particularly when he/she only wants to perform a slight modification.. Visual manipulationsIn order to help a user specify his/her preferences about a Web page, Page Tailor provides some visual manipulations. Fig. 5 demonstrates the feature that a user can select a block in a Web page at different granularity. For example, in the top half of this picture, a block containing more information than that in the bottom is selected. A selected block is highlighted in yellow.Fig. 5. Select blocks at different granularity.Fig. 6 illustrates another feature — drag and drop. In this picture, three views are shown from left to right. In the beginning, three blocks have already been selected (left). Next, we switch the last two blocks (middle), and then the final result es out (right). The sequence of blocks in the Page Tailor window would be the same as that in the browsers on mobile devices.Fig. 6. Rearrange the selected blocks.. User preferencesXPath [9] is a language that describes how to locate specific elements in a document. This is the standard we adopted to store the user preference. In our Web Page Tailoring system, the user preferences stored are posed of XPath expressions. In other words, when a user adds a block to the Page Tailor window, Page Tailor would internally generate an XPath expression for that block. By using XPath expressions, we can uniquely identify this block in the future provided that if the layout of this page does not change too frequently.As for the sequence of selected blocks, the XPath expressions of selected blocks are concatenated together according to their order in the Page Ta