Dynamic Documents: Mobile Wireless Access to the WWW

Abstract

We propose dynamic documents as an approach to extending and customizing the WWW/Mosaic for mobile computing plaforms. Dynamic documents are programs executed on a mobile platform to generate a document; they are implemented as Tcl scripts. We have modified the NCSA Mosaic web client to run the dynamic documents it retrieves through a modfied Tcl interpreter The interpreter is designed to execute only commands that do not violate safety. To hide the latencies of slow links we have modified the Mosaic client to perform caching and prefetching. The policies for caching and prefetching can be under control of dynamic documents, allowing the strategies to be document specific. Using dynamic documents, we have built an adaptive email browser that employs application-specific caching and prefetching strategies. Both the browser and the displayed email messages are dynamically customized to the mobile computing environment in which they run.