Towards web usability: Providing web contents according to the readers contexts

Abstract

Web usability has been considered as a key issue to the success of the Web. However, Web readers typically face difficulties since Web pages are presented according to the local contexts of Web authors. Web authors and readers follow their own local contexts to represent and interpret Web contents as they originate from different communities. Hence, there is a need to transform Web contents created according to the authors’ contexts into the different contexts of their readers.

In this paper, we aim at presenting a solution that provides Web contents according to the reader’s context. Our solution is based on an explicit representation of the authors’ and readers’ local contexts. We rely on RDFa to annotate contents with the author’s context and we provide an adaptation process on the client-side that generates contextualized Web contents according to the readers’ contexts. We validate our approach through a Firefox extension.