On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:33:05 +0100, Michael Wimmer
<ne********@ecom.at> wrote:
could anybody tell me what the current state of technology for mobile
devices is?
In flux.
Last work I did was in PartnerML - Vodafone's (actually Bango's)
technology to allow single-platform authoring for two generations of
devices. You serve content from your server as PartnerML, then Voda's
stack transcodes it into phone-specific content, as required.
Somewhat lumpy, and the standard is less stable than it ought to be,
but it avoids the need for legacy WML support.
Personally, for web work, I'm not careful to use XHTML 1.0 and good
CSS-based fluid design, with some effort placed on the accessibility
aspects. With a little image resizing in the network stack, this gives
good results on PDA-like devices.
Phones still can't "browse the web" - they just don't have the screen
space to allow it. If you're building an app (tickets, pizzas, taxis)
and your _target_ market is phones, then you're still going to have to
use non-mainstream non-vanilla HTML techniques to do it. This is a
mess and you have to talk to the network provider to know what's
really supported.
And if your users are American, &deity; help you - as always, their
phone networks are a nightmare.
WAP / WML isn't dead yet, but thankfully it's sufficiently moribund
and transcoder-wrapped that few people working at the "content
authoring" level still have to worry about it.
--
Smert' spamionam