Re: Multi-channel content

On Wednesday 2004-02-18 09:02 -0000, Rhys Lewis wrote [text re-wrapped]:
> The very existence of the W3C Device Independence Working Group shows
> that there is broad industry support for the need for work to extend
> the capabilities of current web technologies to support the huge
> variety of devices that can now be used on the web.

It's worth noting, however, that the DI group was formed after some
existing, purely client-side, approaches to device independence already
existed (media-specific stylesheets) in HTML4 and CSS2.  This makes it
likely that the group is composed generally of those who are less
satisfied with such approaches, and thus likely that the participants in
this list would tend to be self-selected as those more against the views
expressed in the first message on this thread [1].

The CSS working group is continuing along the path of HTML4 and CSS2
with Media Queries [2], and it wouldn't surprise me if you found the
opinions on www-style [3] to be quite different, since the participants
there are self-selected for the opposite bias.

> On your comment about XHTML, while it is certainly possible to create
> XHTML documents that can be delivered to a range of XHTML compatible
> devices, this does not solve the problem of device independence.
> First, XHTML is not universally supported. XHTML documents are
> unusable on WML devices, for example.

This seems to beg the question of what the web is.  I certainly like to
think of the web as a collection of essentially universally-accessible
information in a small set of core data formats, and I find it hard to
think of a user-agent that can't access most of the information on the
web to be a web user-agent.  (If such a user-agent were accessing the
web through a proxy that transcoded "the web" into WML, the web user
agent in the system would be the combination of the proxy and the
device, and thus the web user agent in the system would support
HTML/XHTML.)

> others, CSS mobile profile. Some devices require stylesheets to be
> external, others require style definitions to be in line. And that is

Are these devices really web user agents, or do they live behind
transcoding proxies that are (in combination with the device) the real
web user agents?  How could they deal with the content on the web?

-David

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-di/2004Feb/0000.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2004 04:47:44 UTC