PART I RI AL The World of the Mobile Web TE CHAPTER 1: Introducing the Mobile Web MA CHAPTER 2: A Technical Overview of the Mobile Web CHAPTER 3: Keeping Abreast of Developments TE D CHAPTER 4: Major Mobile Web Browsers CO PY RI GH CHAPTER 5: The Mobile Toolbox
1 Introducing the Mobile Web WHAT’ S IN THIS CHAPTER? ➤ Your first introduction into the magical world of the mobile web ➤ Learning about the background and heritage of today’s mobile web ➤ Thinking about how you should treat this new medium differently to the way you treat desktop web users ➤ Some of the philosophical themes that will underpin much of your work throughout this book Welcome to your journey into the mobile web.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB what you can do to make your own sites and services as well prepared for this future as possible. Let’s start that journey, in this chapter, by introducing the concepts and principles of the mobile web as a whole. THE INEVITABILITY OF A MOBILE WEB Your grandparents would probably recognize it as an archetypal scene from a science fiction book: Your protagonist, somewhere in the universe, pulls out a small handheld device, taps on it, and speaks.
A Brief History of the Mobile Web ❘ 5 to promote businesses and run commerce across the medium, the Web went from strength to strength, until by the end of the 1990s, it too was a powerful and familiar concept — at least in the developed world.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB i-mode in Japan In February 1999, the Japanese network carrier NTT DoCoMo launched a service called “i-mode” as a feature that allowed mobile subscribers access to simple Web content on their mobile handsets. Rather than requiring a new markup language like HDML or WML, i-mode browsers were capable of rendering pages written in C-HTML, which was simply a subset of the HTML v3.2 language common at the time.
A Brief History of the Mobile Web ❘ 7 WML was an XML -based language and was similar to HDML in that it relied on a card-based paradigm (as shown previously) and shared very few tags with HTML. Web developers who wanted to create sites for WAP handsets needed to craft entirely different markup and interfaces, even when the underlying content was shared with the regular web version of the site.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB A presage of this change was Nokia’s often overlooked decision to develop a port of the WebKit web browser to its Symbian operating system in 2005. (WebKit, the underlying engine of Apple’s recently released Safari browser, had been open-sourced by the company that year.) Nokia’s fi rst handsets to carry the resulting S60 Browser were extremely successful, if not entirely because of the browser alone.
A New Medium ❘ 9 it is no surprise that it is increasingly accepted that the Web looks set to be the dominant content delivery platform for the mobile generation. A NEW MEDIUM So what is this mobile web, and why is it something so different that it deserves whole books dedicated to it? Well, on one hand, it is nothing dramatic at all.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB as distinct media — even spawning entirely separate industries. Is there more to that distinction than simply the fact that the two have different sized screens? Yes, of course. And the differences are context and user expectation.
Revisiting Assumptions ❘ 11 ➤ New places: Whether it’s on a train, waiting in line at a bus stop or an airport, walking down a street, working in the fields, lounging on the beach, or snatching glances while driving a car, humans now have the opportunity to access websites from a whole host of new locations — places where it is impractical or impossible to use a desktop or laptop computer.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB One fi nal point is arguably more important than all of these, and it’s one that sows the seeds for you to be able to really explore the possibility of the mobile web: The mobile phone is so much more than simply a piece of hardware upon which a lonely browser runs.
Mobile Web Considerations ❘ 13 Thematic Consistency A web standards body, the W3C, uses the term thematic consistency. This is not, as you may think, related to themes or the cosmetics of a site, but to the fact that according to the body’s “One Web” philosophy, the whole Web should be accessible from any device — so given a specific URL, any browser should receive the same content.
❘ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB Instead, think hard about what mobile users want to do, and ensure that those critical tasks are as heavily optimized as possible on the mobile version of the interface. Arguably this was one of the big successes of the “native app” phenomenon: Although many apps were little more than views of a company’s existing web content, the app paradigm allowed interface designers to think entirely afresh about how it could be accessed.
