How to design a web site for the mobile web
There are more than 50 companies producing mobile telephones in significant and marketable quantities. By 2009, projections indicate there will be 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide. The market for the delivery of Web content to these mobile device users dwarfs the market for desktops. There is theoretically unlimited potential for expansion of the Web (or Web 2.0) into these devices, and we are now on the cutting edge of Web site design for Mobile Web (or the ‘‘Ubiquitous Web,’’ as it is also becoming known). Mobile Web, Web 2.0, and Ubiquitous Web all express the concept of a boisterous, erratically developing electronic frontier.
The mobile device market is huge, but the very small screen sizes, relatively slow and weak processors, stripped down (simplified) operating systems, and limited memory and storage make it difficult to use the Web as efficiently as you can with static desktop computers. As an example, in growing acknowledgment of the importance of the handheld mobile market, and to help develop content specific to that environment, Adobe has reworked its Device Central development module to allow for previewing of Web content on such devices as cell phones and PDAs early in the Web page development cycle.
The discussion in this section begins with an overview of Web design for the Mobile Web. We will discuss the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) and review common difficulties hindering Web development (such as the lack of standardization, lack of new technology, network connectivity, hardware, and human factors). We will explore problems unique to developing and delivering Web content to the Mobile Web, look at current Web development and content tools (what role will scalable vector graphics play in content delivery, for example), look at Mobile Web browsers, and hazard a guess as to future technologies for Web site authoring for the Mobile Web. For more information on the MWI, see http://www.w3.org/Mobile/.
Background for Mobile Web design
The Web is designed for physically static devices over a network, using tried-and-true technologies to access, store, and transmit data so that the process of sending and storing the data is entirely transparent to the user. The data transferred over the Web is the entire Web page (including the content), rather than content only. The underpinning of the Web protocols is that they are vendor-neutral and can used by any machine to upload/download content. Some Mobile device providers would appear to take the view that, in order for the Web to function reliably, the coding must be device-dependent. However, the lack of standardization actually hinders the spread of Web technologies to mobile devices because each mobile device has its own proprietary coding scheme that will work on a particular device, but will not be rendered in a similar way on other devices. Therefore, W3C has established the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) to establish a common set of standards that all communications companies can adopt (but are not required to) and work from so that there would be interoperability, cross-platform support, and common display configurations.
Even though we do discuss Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) again in the text, we can point out that, here-and-now, there are no standards. However, because WAP has been used for years, it has become the default standard. Many high-end handheld devices (such as the iPhone, the Sprint Blackberry 8830, Verizon Palm Treo, Samsung SCH-i760, Motorola Q Black, or even the SmartPhone) are coming out with much more capable browsers (for example, Windows Mobile Pocket Internet Explorer and Safari for iPhone).
As in the early days of network chaos (before standardization brought about by common reference to the OSI model), there are a plethora of platforms and physical sizes and types.
Screen sizes and resolutions vary, and a prime objective of MWI has been to bring forth standardized data formats that would be accessible by all Mobile Web devices. The MWI is developing a technology analogous to device drivers (called the Device Description Repository) to cope with the great variety of devices out in the worldwide market. These standards (or guidelines) are available to Web developers in W3Cs Best Practices Software Checker Tool.
One of the questions MWI dealt with was the type of content that was to be displayed on mobile devices (such as mobile phones and derivative smartphones, as well as pagers and PDAs, as shown in, and other handheld devices utilizing Internet access on demand from any location and the tools required to develop that content.
As of July 2007, the Device Independent Authoring Language (DIAL) for the Web authoring tools was still officially a work in progress of the W3C. The purpose of DIAL is to provide a uniform coding structure and syntax that will allow content to be displayed on all handheld devices subscribing to the standard. DIAL is designed to allow the development and display of the typical formatting elements of a Web page, including lists, text, links, objects (images) tables, and forms. Objects would include both images and plug-ins, and forms would be interactive. Coding would conform to the XHTML 2.0 standard.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the issue of backward compatibility. No entirely satisfactory technological solution (hardware or software) has yet been reached for accessing the millions of existing Web sites in the Web 2.0 environment.
There are a number of minibrowsers available, but most are stripped down WAP versions of existing full-featured Web browsers (to compensate for the limited bandwidth and simplistic operating systems used in many handhelds). WAP browsers are used throughout most of the world (Japan has its own indigenous standard) to provide all of the basic services of a computer-based Web browser. Examples would be Opera Mobile and Pocket Internet Explorer. Nokia also has its separate (but proprietary) microbrowsers. As of late 2006, a few began to incorporate more advanced Web authoring technologies such as CSS and Ajax.
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