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August 16, 2005
Porting browsers to pockets
Porting browsers to pockets: Cameron Moll and Brian Fling continue a series on bringing the WWW-style pages down to pocket devices. We're going to have to solve this problem eventually, because there's a lot of useful content which has been packaged for desktop WWW browsers, and which people will want to access while on-the-go. Moll & Fling see the main current approaches as (a) ignore the problem (it will indeed become easier eventually); or (b) strip out all the HTML/JS/CSS fancies put in for desktop machines; or (c) hope that mobile stylesheets eventually achieve predictable support; or (d) repackage the site's info so that it is optimized (technically and socially!) for mobile use. I like how they emphasize the "the medium is the message" angle that "content" isn't fungible and can't just be poured into different viewing environments. We have all these problems with rendering text documents outside of desktop machines... things get even more complex when moving beyond HTML's static graphics and limited interactivity to the full range of experiences available in an actual Rich Internet Application. (Looked at another way, some are trying to solve these problems by a format-centric approach (think VRML, SVG, "when will MS support CSS?" etc)... some are trying by a brand-centric approach ("Looks best in Microsoft Vista" and "Give me opensource or give me death!" both), while Macromedia has been working on a capability-centric approach ("provide a known and predictable set of capabilities on whatever browser, operating system, and device the audience member may happen to choose for themselves").) This is just the second article in their four-part series on mobile porting of HTML-formatted content... it's great to see this subject surveyed this way, to compare the different approaches people are wrestling with, and I believe their articles will be referenced even more strongly over the next two, three years.
Posted by John Dowdell at August 16, 2005 02:32 PM
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