Re: Server Side Magic.

But don't mix things up... A more sophisticated messaging application is not
necessarily the same thing.

BTW, one of the main reasons you are having problems making web sites work in the
small-screen format is precisely what I have pointed out for a long time: The
preservation of the document. But mobile phones (and here I can speak from the
considerabel experience of all iMode users) are NOT used in the same way as PCs.
You don't surf the web on your mobile phone. You look for a specific piece of
information - in many ways more similar to the way SMS and email are used
(information transactions, as a matter of fact).

IMHO, any attempt to squeeze the web pages onto the screen of a device you can
comfortably keep in your pocket is doomed. You need ways of reformulating the
information so that only the salient pieces are abstracted. That can be done
manually or automatically, and the latter is the main use case for XSLT.

My 2 cents. A considerably bigger sum is available to the one who finds it in my
book, "Designing wireless information services", which seems to hold up rather
well, I must say. It seems hard to steer away from the fallacy that formatting is
more important than content....

Johan

Tom Worthington wrote:

> At 11:17  23/07/01 +0900, Gerhard Fasol wrote:
> >Tom, I agree with what you are saying... There is a very simple test: look
> >at the website with an imode phone ...
>
> Trying to get the average web site to work on the current small-screen
> i-mode or WAP phone is probably too difficult a task. My suggestion is to
> aim for a quarter-VGA screen on a typical PDA device, such as an MS-Pocket PC.
>
> While messing around with an Internet TV in a hotel recently I found that
> I-mode pages worked reasonably well and the effective TV screen size is
> about the same as one-quarter VGA
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/eal/index.html#MovieLink>. The European
> Interactive TV format recently adopted by Australia appears a bit
> overblown, but would offer the possibility of using the same web pages for
> hand held devices and iTV.
>
> What the mobile industry needs are some reasons for customers to buy new
> products and services. There is no point in promoting technologies which
> are already proven failures, such as WAP and the videophone. In Sydney last
> week I proposed kiddie-groupware as the mobile killer application
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/media/20010719.html>. If young people are using SMS
> for organising social events, then why not give them a more sophisticated
> web based applications to do it?
>
> Tom Worthington FACS tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
> Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
> http://www.tomw.net.au PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
> Visiting Fellow, Computer Science, Australian National University
> Publications Director & Past President, Australian Computer Society
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> YXML? 31 July, Sydney: http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/yxml.html

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  Johan Hjelm, Senior Specialist
     Ericsson Research Japan

  Read more about my recent book
http://www.wireless-information.net
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