TY - GEN
T1 - MAML
T2 - 34th ACM Web Conference, WWW 2025
AU - Pandey, Ayush
AU - Varvello, Matteo
AU - Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque
AU - Zhou, Shurui
AU - Subramanian, Lakshmi
AU - Zaki, Yasir
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/4/28
Y1 - 2025/4/28
N2 - The web experience in developing regions remains subpar, primarily due to the growing complexity of modern webpages and insufficient optimization by content providers. Users in these regions typically rely on low-end devices and limited bandwidth, which results in a poor user experience as they download and parse webpages bloated with excessive third-party CSS and JavaScript (JS). To address these challenges, we introduce the Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), a flat layout-based web specification language that reduces computational and data transmission demands, while replacing the excessive bloat from JS with a new scripting language centered on essential (and popular) web functionalities. Last but not least, MAML is backward compatible as it can be transpiled to minimal HTML/JavaScript/CSS and thus work with legacy browsers. We benchmark MAML in terms of page load times and sizes, using a translator which can automatically port any webpage to MAML. When compared to the popular Google AMP, across 100 testing webpages, MAML offers webpage speedups by tens of seconds under challenging network conditions thanks to its significant size reductions. Next, we run a competition involving 25 university students porting 50 of the above webpages to MAML using a web-based editor we developed. This experiment verifies that, with little developer effort, MAML is quite effective in maintaining the visual and functional correctness of the originating webpages.
AB - The web experience in developing regions remains subpar, primarily due to the growing complexity of modern webpages and insufficient optimization by content providers. Users in these regions typically rely on low-end devices and limited bandwidth, which results in a poor user experience as they download and parse webpages bloated with excessive third-party CSS and JavaScript (JS). To address these challenges, we introduce the Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), a flat layout-based web specification language that reduces computational and data transmission demands, while replacing the excessive bloat from JS with a new scripting language centered on essential (and popular) web functionalities. Last but not least, MAML is backward compatible as it can be transpiled to minimal HTML/JavaScript/CSS and thus work with legacy browsers. We benchmark MAML in terms of page load times and sizes, using a translator which can automatically port any webpage to MAML. When compared to the popular Google AMP, across 100 testing webpages, MAML offers webpage speedups by tens of seconds under challenging network conditions thanks to its significant size reductions. Next, we run a competition involving 25 university students porting 50 of the above webpages to MAML using a web-based editor we developed. This experiment verifies that, with little developer effort, MAML is quite effective in maintaining the visual and functional correctness of the originating webpages.
KW - Developing countries
KW - Digital divide
KW - Web simplification
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105005140763&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=105005140763&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3696410.3714584
DO - 10.1145/3696410.3714584
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105005140763
T3 - WWW 2025 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference
SP - 727
EP - 739
BT - WWW 2025 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 28 April 2025 through 2 May 2025
ER -