Visual access to city websites: A challenge for PDA's GUI

At the inception of the Internet, the websites were only textual. Now, with the graphic possibilities, more and more websites integrate visual aspects, essentially to access and to visualize information. The goal of this paper is to examine the use of some visual techniques in city websites. More particularly, we will examine the metaphor of virtual cities, hypermaps and geography-based accesses, news magazines, etc.In the last part of this paper, we will examine the implications of using those metaphors for small screens, and overall for Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). We will essentially argue that as the syntactic transformations, i.e., the syntactic adaptations are one face of the problem, the semantic adaptation, i.e., the transformation or the adaptation of the metaphors, is a very challenging issue.