5. The argument for standards compliant design
This section's title says it all: I argue that Japanese web developers should make the leap to web standards, which will allow them to create only one version of a website and serve it to all kinds of devices, cell phones included. Note that this doesn't mean web pages should only consist of XHTML Basic markup—using structured XHTML 1.0 is just fine. Advanced browsers will be able to interpret all XHTML 1.0 markup and apply complex CSS, while cell phones only process the XHTML Basic (or XHTML-MP) markup their rendering engine supports.71 In most instances, the result will be satisfactory: computer users see a website with a full-blown layout, while mobile visitors get a less rich, vertically oriented page. The display on mobile browsers then can be further enhanced by means of a separate handheld style sheet (cfr. supra). In other words, the referencing problem that exists with the current versioning methods can effectively be solved by making cross-compatible, standards compliant websites. In a recent interview (Frykholm 2005), Berners-Lee puts it as follows: “A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets.” The notion of “simpler Web pages” can be understood as “web standards replacing tag soup”.
An often heard criticism of this one-serves-all design approach is that it is not always applicable: some websites just are content-heavy and cannot be viewed properly with a cell phone browser, even though they are made with web standards. A good example is a site featuring a lot of pictorial content; when mobile browsers try to render the pictures, they quickly bump into the cell phone's processing limit and fail to deliver a good result.
It is here the W3C's Composite Capabilities / Preferences Profile recommendation (CC/PP) (2004) comes in.72 CC/PP is a system for describing device capabilities and user preferences. The idea is that, upon requesting a web page, browsers communicate their CC/PP info to the server hosting the page. The profile describes the device's screen resolution, its processing limit and other relevant info.73 CC/PP aware servers then can easily adjust the requested content accordingly and send an optimized page to the device in question. In the earlier mentioned photo site example, this optimization would include a resize of the images so as to make them fit the mobile phones' resolution and processing power.
Although there are already a lot of CC/PP implementations, the still new technology might scare away some. In that case creating a separate (standards compliant) mobile version hosted on a different URI is probably the best solution for the time being. However, it is important to keep in mind that this is only a stop-gap measure as it actually disturbs cross-device referencing.
In most cases however, CC/PP won't be necessary—plain XHTML 1.0 and CSS already do a great job and, in addition to facilitating site maintenance, considerably improve document portability and the user experience.
71 As mobile browsers tend not to be too strict about unknown doctypes or markup, serving them XHTML 1.0 is fine; they will try to render the document as good as they can.
72 The CC/PP recommendation can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-CCPP-struct-vocab-20040115/. Furthermore, “Introduction to Composite Capabilities / Preferences Profile” (Web Standards Project, 2004) is a good introduction to CC/PP.
73 The User Agent Profile specification (UAProf) (2001) is a real-world implementation of the CC/PP recommendation and can be found at http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/affiliates/wap/wap-248-uaprof-20011020-a.pdf. In its current form, UAProf seems to have some shortcomings though; hence the open source project “Wireless Universal Resource File” or WURFL, which tries to incorporate the UAProf data of as much devices as possible into one big configuration file that can be hosted locally (instead of several profiles on remote servers as is the case with UAProf). See http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ for more info.