(keitai-l) Re: Mobile Web Development in Japan: A Tag Soup Tale

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 12/06/05
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0512070014420.2346@angelic.cynic.net>
On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Mike Sheetal wrote:

> i don't claim to be the most knowledgeable on this, but in my feeling
> is that it has more to do with stages of support. some features and
> styling are just better supported with a different markup....

Such as? I'd appreciate any examples at all of things you can't do in
XHTML. The only one I can think of is multiple pages within one download
that you can't scroll between.

> a generalised answer would be dealing with media and
> styling (as mentioned before : css and especially external css support
> is very poor).

But this has nothing to do with XHTML versus other markup languages;
it's entirely orthogonal. You can use XHTML without using CSS at all,
as I do, or you could attempt to do all your styling in CSS and not use
XHTML.

> my current idea is to actually build everything as xhtml and build
> parsing functions for limited handsets. this is a bit varied plan of
> attack from the WALL approach but maybe a similar concept.

What would these functions do?

> The other point is I am trying to do my best job to think of it from a
> global perspective as well and there are way more flavours out there
> when you start to bring in the American/ European/ other Asian markets.

This I understand, and it gets much wider than just markup. For example,
delivering services over SMS instead of the web is much more than a
markup issue.

I'm just intensely curious, because barring emoji, I've been using the
*exact* same markup, which is XHTML with certain extensions that all
vendors support, for every single phone hitting mobile.tabemo.com, and
have yet to hear a complaint outside of Tuka users. I did a testing
session more than a year ago with more than twenty different phones, old
and new, and found that they all worked well when I used the exact same
markup on all of them. That's one of the reasons I completely ripped
WML, cHTML and MML out of the site, at considerable cost savings.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974

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Received on Tue Dec 6 17:24:05 2005