Making Small Devices Look Great

This article gives tips for how to make your Web site work on mobile phones as well as PC screens.

( Read the article )

I Beleive in Web Based Computing that is Device Independent and Secure.
That is why I like Opera, It is the same GUI for Windows and Linux.
The Article is Technical and is mainly about Mini Opera and Mobile Browsing.
Where can I find Rich Content on Web Based Computing from the Designer or Systems Analyst view?

Great article. Another tip: make it xhtml and test it in a text based browser like Lynx.

Please someone post some links to great looking "Opera Mini" sites. I need to see what's possible, tickle my imagination:)

Thanks,
Elias

One of the few sites that actually has a (useful) handheld style sheet is My Opera. This site, Dev Opera, also uses @media handheld. There are a, erm, handful others too, but using media queries is not yet a common thing. Something like a Zen Garden for handheld style sheets could be useful.

We have a secure asp site for our customers to log into and get info they need. I was thinking we could just build a special site for the small mobile format but it seems like we would never be able to build a useful UI the way the mobile browers are. So, now I am thinking we would need to build our own application (JAVA perhaps?) instead. Does this make sense?

I would have preferred the site/browser way since it would be no need for us to support any installations etc.

Trying to understand...all thoughts welcome!

Elias

This depend on whom you want to reach. Opera Mobile, the KHTML-based Nokia browser, and NetFront are probably the technically best browsers, and at least the first two should have a fair chance of handling whatever you'd choose to throw at them. But none of these would work on low-end phones, which are by far the most common.

This article is not aiming towards state of the art, leaning more towards the common ground instead. You can create sites that work well and look good on more capable browsers, but still are usable on the others. Keep in mind the physical constraints, small display, slow processors with limited memory, slow entry on phone keyboard, and you should be good to go. As such there is nothing you can't display with the better browsers.

Making a Java (to be exact J2ME) application is one way to go. It depends on the penetration of Java-capable phones among your customers, which varies from country to country. Japan for instance has a fairly low Java support, I am not sure what is the case in Taiwan. But if I were to make Java support a requirement for an application, I would go for the Opera Mini Java application first. It is one of the Java applications that is most likely to be downloaded already, saving you from requiring your customers to do an installation before being able to use your application. The development cost would be lower, as would the maintenance cost, and Opera Mini has a rapid development schedule. In general phones disallow the use of more than one Java application at a time, making a special purpose application less convenient. If Opera Mini is incapable of supporting your application, then custom-made may make sense.

Hi. I'd like to know if Opera Mobile will be supporting XSLT some time soon. My site serves XML files which are then transformed to HTML by the browser. I have already made my site work with the desktop version of Opera(including the SSR renderer using media queries). Unfortunately I was unable to get the desired results after I tried accessing my site on my XDA II. I just got the plain xml files (untransformed). I'm hoping Opera would implement XSLT for mobile devices. Anyway, I would appreciate any suggestions on how I might proceed in this situation. Please tell me if you guys know of any mobile browsers capable of XSLT.

Thanks,
Rio

I don't think I would recommend XSLT on phones. Even though we have a pretty efficient XSLT implementation, XSLT has unfortunate characteristics. It needs processing power and memory, both scarce on a phone, and it doesn't allow incremental rendering which means poor interactivity while the phone is processing the transformation sheet. Now, I haven't tested this, but I think the user experience may be poor.

The alternative to doing XSLT on the client is doing it before it reaches the client. In your case that would likely be on the server (in other cases it could be done by a proxy).

Whatever form XSLT is used, I'd just want to repeat the standard caution that it is the quality of the document *after* transform that matters, this is what will cost memory and responsiveness. So if the post-transform document is a huge blob of table tags, 'font' and the like, it is not going to perform well on a phone, no matter how clean it was before the transform. Make sure the post-transform code is terse and meaningful.

Originally posted by riog:

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I might proceed in this situation.

Most mobile browsers do not support XSLT at the moment. This is partly due to the processing power needed to process XSLT, which can be too intensive for the low power CPUs used by mobiles. Even if it is possible to use XSLT natively on some high powered devices, it might not be possible on all of the common ones. If you have access to server side processing, I would recommend using that instead. With PHP, it is as easy as this:

<?php

$xml = new DomDocument();
$xml->load('source.xml');

$xsl = new DomDocument();
$xsl->load('style.xsl');

$xslt = new XsltProcessor();
$xslt->importStylesheet($xsl);

$transformation = $xslt->transformToXml($xml);
echo $transformation;

?>

Code taken from the PHP documentation, sadly it is no longer included on the page where it used to be, so I cannot link to it, but there is more documentation about PHP's XSL support here: http://www.php.net/xsl

Thanks guys. I guess I have no choice but to do it on the server side. I'm using Java by the way so I'll probably end up with an XSLT API from the SDK or a third-party.

thanks for great article!

Originally posted by samc:

I Beleive in Web Based Computing that is Device Independent and Secure.That is why I like Opera, It is the same GUI for Windows and Linux.The Article is Technical and is mainly about Mini Opera and Mobile Browsing.

Since I wrote the Above words I have a New Nokia 6070 Mobile and Mini-Opera is working fine with J2ME Nokia Browser, (Or Opera Mini) GPRS, preferably with sockets. Saving Bookmarks is easy.
This is not a Laptop, but a very good and inexpensive way to be Available and check e-mails , NEWS SMS's, Simple Photos etc...

This site rocks..lot of info and very useful... And http://www.operamini.com/ truly helps too. Thank you guys...

..........
WeirdTom