4.2 Oddly flavored mobile browsers (continued)
When looking at Vodafone KK cell phones, the picture is less complicated, although not free of proprietary hooks. Originally, when Vodafone KK was called J-Phone, mobile phones could access the web through its J-Sky service, which was similar to NTT DoCoMo's i-mode. J-Phone recommended coding pages with its Mobile Markup Language (MML), which bears close resemblance to NTT DoCoMo's cHTML and is a mix of classic HTML and some J-Sky specific extensions. In 2003, when J-Phone became Vodafone KK, the company's web service changed into Vodafone Live!61 and handsets started supporting XHTML Basic, XHTML-MP and a large part of CSS 2. For backward compatibility reasons, Vodafone KK cell phones also render a number of non-standard tags and attributes often found in other browser implementations.62 Examples include <font>, <marquee> and the bgsound attribute. Also note that Vodafone Live! supports a wide set of emoji that can be used in e-mails or on webpages.63 However, as the emoji are mapped to different Unicode entities, there is no cross-compatibility with the ones supported on NTT DoCoMo handsets.
KDDI's AU carrier, whose mobile gateway is called EZweb,64 sells handsets with yet another setup. At first, AU devices supported the earlier mentioned Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML).65 More recent models however come with support for its XML-based successor, the Wireless Markup Language (WML)66 and also know how to handle cHTML, XHTML Basic, XHTML-MP and WAP CSS. As one could expect, the AU browser can also interpret proprietary markup such as <marquee>, <bgsound>,67 NTT DoCoMo's istyle attribute and even the noteworthy copyright attribute, which prevents users from downloading embedded movie clips. As for emoji, AU follows yet another mapping system, thereby breaking compatibility with similar implementations on NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone KK cell phones.68
Combining these several often incompatible mobile technologies with the “versionitis” problem mentioned in the previous section, we can make the following analysis. In the early years of mobile web development, browsers as Internet Explorer 4.0, 5.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.0 were still common and the web standards movement was in an early stage, meaning that coding for specific environments was common practice. When cHTML, i-HTML, MML and HDML came along, Japanese web developers simply adapted to the new mobile environment and started creating several mobile versions of their websites, each of which then could be accessed at a different URI. Sometimes, this practice still continues today (cfr. the Toshiba and Japan Airlines websites); in other cases, developers settled on only one mobile version that sort of works on all cell phones (cfr. the NHK website). In almost all instances, these mobile sites are riddled with non-standard markup, echoing the chaos of proprietary extensions that Japanese cell phones support.
However, throughout this extensive line-up of mobile markup languages, two key technologies seem to stand out: XHTML Basic (XHTML-MP) and CSS. Both languages are well supported by the recent generation of Japanese cell phones, which are increasingly replacing older models.69 Furthermore, support for XHTML based technologies on cell phones is likely to further increase. An example thereof is the recent launch of AU's W21CA model, which is shipped with the Opera browser preinstalled, meaning it fully supports XHTML 1.0 and 1.1.70
Hence, I will propose an alternative approach—a new direction Japanese web development should take.
61 More info on Vodafone Live! can be found at http://www.vodafone.jp/english/live/.
62 For this reason, Vodafone KK calls its XHTML implementation Vodafone Live! compatible XHTML. However, as the number of proprietary extensions is rather limited, it seems more correct to just see it as XHTML Basic or XHTML-MP with a few minor additions. More info available at http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/download.php?docid=135.
63 See http://developers.vodafone.jp/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_01.php for a list of supported emoji.
64 More EZweb info on http://www.au.kddi.com/english/ezweb/./. TU-KA, another KDDI carrier, also provides internet access through the EZweb gateway. As its user base is rather limited, I will not deal with it separately though.
65 AU's (and TU-KA's) HDML devices are/were capable to access cHTML sites through a server side conversion mechanism that transforms cHTML into HDML and then communicates it to the requesting HDML device.
66 The WML specifications can be found at http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm.
67 Note that <bgsound> is supported as a tag, not as an attribute of the <body> tag.
68 AU specific emoji info can be found at http://www.au.kddi.com/ezfactory/tec/spec/3.html.
69 An example: according to the January 2005 data of the (Japanese) Telecommunications Carriers Association, more than 17 million subscribers use a third generation AU phone with an advanced browser, while less then 2 million subscribers use an older AU model (with a less advanced browser).
70 More info on the W21CA at http://www.casio.co.jp/k-tai/w21ca/.