Hi everybody,
Thanks for the interesting comments on my paper. Keep 'em coming ;-)
Some clarification about the points I wanted to make:
1. I believe it's important that URIs can be accessed with any
browsing device. No /k, /i or even .mobi variants, just the same URI
for all user agents - that's true device independence. So far, I
haven't seen very much discussion about this point.
2. If you use XHTML for structure, CSS for layout, most mobile
browsers know what to do with your page. You can add some basic
handheld CSS rules to make things prettier, but the most important
thing is that the content can be *accessed* with both classic and
mobile browsers. That's enough for most websites: I'm talking about
10-page company websites, search engines, blogs, papers, etc.
3. About PC vs. mobile navigation/UI: a lot of navigation/UI issues
can be elegantly solved with the XHTML+CSS combo (cfr. Michael, Kyle),
but for complex websites, it's probably a good idea to offer a version
with a navigation/UI optimized for mobile phones (cfr. Curt, Chris).
This optimized version then is ideally mapped to the same URI as its
non-mobile counterpart (using UAProf (CC/PP) or WURFL), and has XHTML
Basic (or XHTML-MP) under the hood.
4. The same logic as in 3 can be applied on content heavy sites
(flash, images, etc.), which cannot be rendered because of processing
limitations.
5. Only if your client absolutely wants that his site has colors in
the problematic DoCoMo browsers, or else, if he relies on specific
proprietary hooks for delivering services to end users (talking about
iapplet or iswf, etc.), going the XHTML way is probably not an option.
Let me give two real-world examples, to illustrate my point:
-> my paper (http://andreas.web-graphics.com/mobile/) is XHTML+CSS and
can be accessed with desktop and mobile browsers (only tested AU, but
I believe it also works with other carriers). Navigation is simple,
and works fine across all platforms. No need for extra versions.
-> TAB (http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/) is XHTML+CSS and can be viewed
with desktop browsers - as the navigation is rather complex and the
content quite heavy, we decided to create an alternative mobile
version. The mobile site, which can be found at the same address, is
built with XHTMLBasic+CSS and the URIs of individual events and venues
are perfectly portable from one device to another.
So, I'd like to see more of this kind of stuff on the Japanese web.
Andreas
--
http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/blog/
Received on Thu Dec 8 14:09:31 2005