Introduction

Anybody who has recently visited Japan will say the same thing when it comes to the topic of mobile phones: Japanese handsets are years ahead of their European and North-American counterparts. New models all come with a color screen, multi-megapixel camera, flash memory, mail client and some even allow you to watch TV or listen to radio channels. Another highly popular feature is the built-in web browser, which gives users access to a wide range of internet applications, thereby providing an extra layer of functionality. Many Japanese use their mobile phones for looking up information, querying train connections, posting messages on online bulletin boards, and so forth.

In this paper, I have a close look at how Japanese web applications are built and analyze the ways in which they interact with mobile browsing devices.

Firstly, I outline the idea of universality that forms the basis for the design of the internet. Next, I give an overview of how web development practices have evolved throughout the last decade and I introduce the concept of web standards. The fourth section looks at Japanese mobile browsers and the content they process. In the end, I argue that the current mix of coding schemes that we encounter in Japanese web development should be replaced with web standards and provide an outlook on the changes we might expect.