Designing for WAP

[rhs]

Hi everyone,

Would anybody be able to guide me about designing a website for regular browers at 800x600 (which I know all of us do) and designing for WAP enables devices at the same time. Do I have to do different pages for both, what are the things to be taken into account for doing this. (WAP devices are generally b/w) and how would the pages look on handheld computers like Psion/Palm/others.
How do I take into account the screen res of these small screens?

How should one go about it?

If any one could enlighten me, I shall be thankful.

Regards

RHS

[ronaldb66]

One glaringly obvious advice would be: use the current industry standards as layed down by the W3C, apply the Separate Content & Structure from Presentation principle, and design different stylesheets for different devices.

I haven't got the foggiest idea whether or not such devices are available that support mentioned standards (I suspect there are), but it would be the soundest approach anyway.

[meow]

I'm interested in this too, in small devices in general.

Does content always need to be transformed to WML for WAP for instance? The WAP emulators I've tried don't eat HTML.

Only have my desktop, me. :(

[ronaldb66]

You've got me there; dunno a thing 'bout WML...
Since XHTML is basically a XML application, couldn't XSL-Transform be used to make WML out of it?

[meow]

I don't know what people use. But I'm basically wondering if one needs to do the transformation or of that's a limitation in my emulator. Simply put, does those things only understand WML?

[brothercake]

Mobile phones generally do only support WML, unless they have more sophisticated browsers like those mobile/PDA hybrids. An emulator, I guess, would be the same.

But you can go through google from a WAP phone or emulator and view regular webpages - Google has a HTML-WML proxy :)

But WML is very simple - you could transform strict XHTML directly into WML, but it would probably be better either to start with XML and do server transforms to deliver XHTML or WML ... but easier to start by making some static WML pages just to get the feel for it.

There's a tutorial at W3Schools - http://www.w3schools.com/wap/

PDAs on the other hand have HTML browsers which typically support HTML 3 or a subset of HTML 4. The main thing with them is to forget about style ... a plain semantic XHTML page with no CSS should be perfectly accessible to these devices, so that's the way to approach it I think. Don't use tables for layout ... goes without saying ... because content must be easily linearised if it's to fit on such narrow screens.

Opera has a "small screen rendering" option that gives a reasonably good indication, and I believe there's a Pocket-CE emulator with the Windows CE SDK, but I don't know where that is; somewhere at microsoft.com ..

[ronaldb66]

Brothercake,

yeah, I stumbled across that one about immediately after posting and a spot of
Googling... :D
Nice introduction, and gives a good feel of the limitations of WML on a phone... :rolleyes: After reading some more I started to think along the lines of pure XML and transformations, too, but I have to admit that's all pretty new to me.

[brothercake]

W3Schools again ... their XSL tutorial is really good.

XSL is really really easy at first .. you can get into really quite complicated transforms quite quickly. IT's XPath and XPointer that are hard ...

[ronaldb66]

I read the "XML Bible" front to back, and started re-reading it recently, but it still remains complex subject matter. I guess getting hands-on with it would help deeper understanding, but there's always so much to do, and so little time... :(

[brothercake]

W3Schools tutorials are a good way to get started ... but good books help a lot. O'Reily's "XML in a nutshell" is very good, and so is their "XSLT" reference.

I've also been reading "Xpath, XLink, XPointer and XML - A Practical guide to web hyperlinking and transclusion" by Wilde & Lowe, which is all about using XML technologies to build hypermedia applications, multi-document interfaces, that kind of thing .. where data and data-relationships are what matters, presentation becomes arbitrary :)

It's a good feeling ... very encouraging .. XML has been a whole new headspace for me, like interoperability issues are a thing of the past, and nothing seems like a problem anymore :thumbsup: