Content Negotiation and Adaptation, Why and How .. ?

The objective of the content negotiation and adaptation in heterogeneous environments is
to make devices having limited capacities able to use the network services and documents. 

Players (or browsers) on embedded devices have limited processing powers and can't achieve
a big effort to make the user able to handle and use a service or a document which is not 
adapted to the client (user + device) capabilities and preferences. In such situation, 
it will be more efficient to make the effort at the server (or an intermediate proxy) side.
In all the cases the final provided document must be understandable by the end user.

Making many versions of the original content and deliver the appropriate version is very hard
to do because we can't:

- Prevent all the kind of the existing devices
- Author the huge quantity of servers content in many variants

A complete content negotiation and adaptation solution must be the one that makes servers able
to deliver, if possible, an understandable variant of the original document. Otherwise, the
server must be able to adapt on the fly the original content according to the client
characteristics but also according to the network capabilities and other elements that play a
role in the content negotiation and adaptation.

Two questions arise here:

1) How can content servers achieve the acquisition of a complete image of the characteristics of
clients, documents, network, etc.?    
2) How can we apply the matching of all these descriptions in order to end with an adapted
service or content that meet after all the user preferences and capabilities. ?  


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Tayeb Lemlouma
http://www.inrialpes.fr/opera/people/Tayeb.Lemlouma/index.html
Opera project
National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control (INRIA Rhône-Alpes, France )
Office B213, phone (+33) 04 76 61 52 81, Fax (+33) 04 76 61 52 07.