RE: Transforming HTML to WML

["Peter Stark" <stark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

James Robertson wrote:
>
> In fact, this is one of the big
> complaints about WAP: there is no ability
> to surf normal HTML pages using it.
>

Surfing "normal" HTML pages has never been an interesting enough use case.
You don't *want* to see the same page on your phone as you see on your PC.
On the PC you expect a lot more, on a phone you just want the information
you are looking for (no more and no less).

Having accepted that you need one variant of your Web site for small devices
(phones) and another variant for regular PC browsers, the question is
whether the pages for the phones could not simply have been small HTML
pages, instead of WML. They probably could, in most cases, but now they are
not so accept that you need a Web site that serve up XHTML to one half of
your clients and WML to the other.

And here is where XSLT comes into play: store the content in your own native
XML format, use one transformation sheet for the phones (yourXML->WML) and
another for the regular browsers (yourXML->XHTML).

(It is safe to say that the HTTP user-agent header field is the most
important piece of the incoming HTTP request; or you may serve up a 10M
XHTML document to a phone...)

Thanks,

Peter Stark
Architect, Phone.com


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list