Give me a break <BR>
My brother just posted me the news from ZDNet about Opera's claim to have "solved" the problem of browsing normal web pages on small devices. Really? Give me a break! I thought we had buried this myth a while ago, as discussed on my course, so it looks like I'll have to give it a mention.
Anyone with any experience of web authoring knows that unguided transcoding from ordinary web pages into small-device browsers does not work (will never work) except in a few sterile cases. Apparently, what Opera does is reformat pages into one column so that the user only has to vertically scroll. Granted, this may increase usability slightly in the mobile context, but it's hardly going to solve the problem that in my opinion is simply unsolvable and so such claims should come with a fools gold warning label.
What Opera does do - and I think this is what they are trying to promote here with their new browser version - is provide embedded browsers with full HTML support. This is interesting as it addresses the issue of not having to code in another ML for small devices (e.g. WML or cHTML). The new desktop version of Opera is able to display pages in small device format too. Why would you want to do that? Clearly so that you can see what it looks like if you're authoring pages. So in effect, the real intent of Opera is to modify the authoring process going forward, so the original claim is a loaded one really.
There are too many issues here to be dealt with in a small posting, so I may write all this stuff up in a whitepaper and post it (I needed a topic to write about for my first weblog whitepaper - you may have noticed I'm a newbie blogger - is that a noggler or something? don't know much of the jargon I'm afraid). WAP no longer uses WML, so someone should tell that to a few of these analysts who seem woefully out of date in their "analysis". It uses XHTML-WP which is a profile of XHTML-Basic. What that gains is another story (see forthcoming whitepaper - i.e. subscribe to my log).
One thing to look at for those interested in authoring for all possible end-user devices is Volantis. This is a very useful piece of software that you use in the delivery of pages and works especially well in conjunction with BEA's Weblogic Server, both as used by Three (Hutchison3G). You can think of Volantis as a kind of Cyscape's BrowserHawk in reverse. BrowserHawk is purely a browser-capability detection solution, but the main value add is that Cyscape are tracking browser capabilities for you. Similarly Volantis are tracking device browser capabilities, even down to the variations that occur from one firmware release to another (recall the dreadful experience of coding WAP for the 7110 only to find that "all" the phones were different).
Volantis actually takes care of the page formatting for you based on the assumption that you have coded the pages either using their JSP tags or their extensions to HTML (and now they are supporting inbound XML). The re-formatting can be device or device-family tailored and is all under the control of a graphical layout tool included with Volantis. Even URL re-writing (as URL length is also a variable capability on devices) and page-length "chunking" are taken care of by Volantis.
Ultimately what we need is a networked version of Volantis and their design tools, or something similar (hey! there's a cool product opportunity here!!) that authors can use, the idea being that the mobile operators should host the solution and provide it free-of-charge as part of their mobile network API offerings. WAKEUP OPERATORS!!!! It should be your job guys to make sure we can edit pages for any of your customers!!! Don't you want wireless data to succeed?
Now I'm asking myself how do I run my weblog to be readable on certain mobile devices. I'm going to have to go look to see if someone's already done it. Hmmm - I can smell cooking, must go now...
1:34:09 PM 
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