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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 fi ction
book: Your protagonist, somewhere in the universe, pulls out a small handheld device, taps on it,
and speaks. On the other side of the planet or spaceship upon which the action takes place, others
receive the call, listen to the message, and begin to converse. It was not very long ago that wireless
communication was the ultimate in futuristic high technology. As recently as 30 years ago, most
people ’ s usage of telephones was relatively rare, costly, and short - distance. More importantly, it was
utterly constrained by copper; you couldn ’ t make a call unless you were within a few meters of the
handset. Only 15 years before that, most national and all international calls required an operator to
patch calls through huge switchboard, cables and all.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, this started to change dramatically. Developments in radio and cellular
technologies, coupled with the miniaturization and cheapening of computing hardware, enabled
new possibilities: networks in which people could carry their telephone devices with them (or
barely carry them, in the case of some of the early suitcase - sized models!), and, assuming they had
suffi cient radio coverage, place and receive calls while on the move.
Initially relying on analog technologies, and then through the creation and standardization of
subsequent generations of digital technologies, these devices rapidly grew in number and fell in
cost. At the same time, the cellular networks required to connect them grew in size, coverage, and
interconnectedness. The cell phone became commonplace, even ubiquitous, and before you knew it,
the constraints placed on where and when you could talk to friends and colleagues over the phone
had been lifted.
Equipped with their miniature keyboards and screens, it was not long before other ways in which
these small devices could be used started to emerge. The digital technologies used to transmit
and receive voice were also perfectly capable of doing so for small amounts of data. Almost
unintentionally, the GSM standard, for example, allowed users to send and receive short messages
of 140 characters in length with their devices. By 2000, billions of such messages were being sent
worldwide. Clearly the mobile device had the potential to be more than just a way to talk to others:
It could be used as a device capable of sending and receiving data from other handsets, or indeed,
central services.
The 1990s also saw the birth of the Web — a way in which computers could connect to the vast,
interconnected Internet and access pages of information residing on servers elsewhere, worldwide.
Again, this had been an evolution from more primitive and simple technologies, but the Web
burgeoned, thanks to factors such as the ease with which users could use browsers to navigate
through content, the array of tools that made it easy for authors to create and publish content, and
again, the decreasing cost and increasing power of computing hardware.
Buoyed by a dream of having the world ’ s knowledge and information formulated in an open way that
humans could access it in dynamic and compelling ways, not to mention the prospects of being able
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