Creating A Mobile Website
There has been some interest in creating and converting websites to mobile sites.
Technology
The first question to answer is what are the technologies used in current phones.
WAP – Wireless Access Protocol
This is the initial and most simplistic type of web browser. The phone I had over 5 years ago probably had this browser. Cingular Web and all that. There are probably some phones that still use the old WAP browsers, but not smartphones. I don’t see any real reason to invest time into learning WAP or WML.
XHTML / WML
The Mobile Web primarily utilizes lightweight pages written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limitations by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HTML commonly found on the desktop Web.
WMLScript
WML uses WMLScript to run simple code on the client. WMLScript is a light JavaScript language. However, WML scripts are not embedded in the WML pages. WML pages only contains references to script URLs. WML scripts need to be compiled into byte code on a server before they can run in a WAP browser.
Other
After digging around, it looks like a lot of mobile sites just use php/html with a plain background.
Testing
According to Wikipedia, mTLD, the registry for .mobi, has released a free testing tool called the MobiReady Report to analyze the mobile readiness of website. It does a free page analysis and gives a Mobi Ready score. This report tests the mobile-readiness of the site using industry best practices and standards.
Limitations
Web Browsers provide device-independent limitations. Newer smartphones such as the iPhone and Android phones are less restrictive. According to Wikipedia, some problems which may be encountered include:
- Small screen size
