What's wireless to a web developer?

The world's going wild over wireless. Whew! But what does this mean to the designer of Web sites? Plenty. The wireless wave is one of several trends that will change the nature of Web development - and ironically make Web coding more like the way it was originally conceived. Here's a look at some of the issues involved in creating Web content for wireless clients, and wireless-enabling existing sites.

The short (and superficial) answer to this article's title question is simply "smaller screens". But the real story is not just size, but diversity. There will soon be a huge variety of different display types to design for. These days, a device may have a screen of any size, or none at all. And devices are being asked to do some different things than the traditional desktop Web site was expected to do.

The computing world is quickly growing to include a much greater variety of I/O devices accessing the Internet. Wireless is only one of several factors feeding this trend, but it's a powerful one. The main benefit of wireless is mobility, and mobility means small units carried on the person, or installed in a vehicle. Unlike the market for desktop operating systems and browsers, the markets for cell phones, consumer electronic gadgets, cars, wristwatches and tie pins are not dominated by a couple of companies each. Everybody and his brother is going to be introducing a wireless Internet gadget over the next few years, and they're all going to be different.

This is not to say that there won't be standards. As always, there are various standards kicking around, with WAP taking a lead for now (more about WAP below). But breaking free from the desktop will necessarily mean a much wider variety of devices. An Internet device in a car might have a sizable screen, while a wristwatch would have a tiny one. And a voice-activated gadget for a blind person might have no screen at all. In fact, some wireless devices connected to the Internet have no human I/O interface at all, but simply transmit data to other devices (for example, remote metering and vending, or telemetry applications).

Nor is it just a question of the type of I/O interface. Some devices will need to access different types of information than others. Small size and finite battery life means that devices, and the servers that feed them content, need to be designed to do a few things efficiently, instead of the do-it-all strategy of a desktop browser. Sites that want to be accessible to wireless gadgets will basically have to offer alternate versions to fit.

Contents:

The Problem: HTML
The Solution: XML

The Problem: HTML