Enabling the Transition to the Mobile Web with WebSieve

Motivation:

In this paper it presents the WebSieve architecture to democratize the ability to generate mobile-friendly websites. It focuses on reducing the high load times on mobile devices for generic web pages.

Main points:

-- To reduce the high load time, three high-level requirements are needed before achieving this goal in practice:

• Structure-awareness: blocking one object may cause other objects to be filtered.
• Utility-awareness: predicting the expected utility that an user gets from different objects, so that critical content of website won’t be clipped out because of filtering.
• Practical optimization: taking into account the practical issues, like budget/dependency constraints, complexity of parallel loading for browsers.
  

-- Using WebSieve to reduce page load times, it primarily focuses on achieving the balance between page load time, user experience and interests of website providers.

-- There are two practical challenges: 

dependencies between objects and difficulty of modeling loading time.

To address the first challenge, it proposes compact integer linear programming formulations. 
For the loading time, it’s addressed by leveraging the load time waterfall for the original web page.

Trade-offs:

-- For the dependency, a specific object can be downloaded only after its logical parents have been processed. It relies on identifying the parents. It does not illustrate how to find logical parents, or the cost of it.

-- In order to increase user experience, it delays the load of some objects on the website. But it’s hard to decide which parts are blocked or delayed based on the objects utility, and importantly, the variety of users’ interest and website types.