Datasheet

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. The fundamental idea is still that

you have a browser, a server, some standardized protocols and ﬁ le formats passing between them,

and a user who can view and traverse through content provided by site owners.

And you ’ ve now reached a point where, more or less, those protocols and ﬁ les are written,

produced, and interpreted in the same way on a desktop or laptop computer as they are on a mobile

device. For markup, most mobile devices accept and handle some sort of XHTML or HTML5; for

graphics, they can display PNG, GIF, or JPEG ﬁ les with high color depth; for styling, at least simple

forms of CSS should be understood and interpreted in some way; and, on contemporary devices,

JavaScript is feasible for adding interactivity to a mobile website.

So far, so familiar. In terms of technology, you are more or less on familiar ground. You should

be careful of one or two things: Flash and Silverlight, for example, are not recommended for

widespread use on mobile handsets, because there are major swathes of devices that do not support

either, so they should be used selectively at most.

But despite the fact that they build on the same standards, you do need to treat mobile browsers

signiﬁ cantly differently from desktop ones. Some of the reasons for this are still technical in

nature. A mobile network is not the same as a landline Internet connection, for example. There are

considerations of throughput and latency — not to mention a possible cost to the subscriber — when

a mobile device is accessing a website over a cellular network. Sensibly, a mobile website should be

extremely considerate toward the requirements it makes on the network; large, unwieldy pages that

are slow to display and render are clearly not well suited to the challenge.

Also, despite huge advances in processor power and graphics acceleration, most mobile browsers

are running on hardware that is well below the speciﬁ cation of an average computer. Sites that put

undue load on the CPU or even GPU of a mobile device are likely to be more sluggish than the same

site on a desktop device. And even if the handset can provide a decent user experience for such a

page, it probably comes at the expense of temperature or battery usage, something that is still at a

premium in most handheld devices.

Finally, of course, a mobile device has a different form factor and size to a desktop computer. It

certainly has a smaller screen, probably with a different default orientation, and may lack a physical

keyboard and almost certainly lacks a mouse. Any website that makes desktop - based assumptions

about a particular type of input device or screen size undoubtedly provides a suboptimal experience

on a mobile device. For these reasons alone, it is worth thinking about the mobile web as a different

medium than the desktop - centric Web that we all use.

But that ’ s not the whole story. Consider cinema and television, for example. There are certainly

similarities between them: Both present visual information on screens, people sit and view them,

and both can display the same material in theory. But there is still no doubt that the two are treated

A New Medium

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