E-Books use electronic ink as their display technology and thus have a very different set of constraints regarding the available interface design and user interactions. Current browsers are built around the model of scrolling, and thus adapt well to the constraints of e-ink displays. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the accepted way to control the presentation of HTML documents, and the question is whether and how CSS can be used to support e-ink devices. CSS is being extended to also cover advanced layout capabilities and paged content, but these extensions so far are mostly intended for printed output. The goal of this project is to look at the state of the art in CSS standardization and implementation, develop requirements for CSS support for e-ink devices (i.e., interactive paged content), and see what is possible given the limitations of the current CSS standardization and implementation.

Depending on the preferences of the students, this project can focus on interaction and interface design, or it can include experimentation and implementation work. The iRex iLiad is an e-ink device running a Linux operating system. There is no browser available on that device, but iRex has a developer program and a SDK and it would be very interesting to work towards porting a browser to the iLiad.