isham research

Handheld-friendly web pages

This site - and several others managed by isham research Web Services - is gradually being converted to a handheld-friendly format. If you have a cellular handset, PDA, Blackberry, etc., with an Internet link and a browser - most cellphones sold since 2002 or so - you can bookmark one of these pages and access it at will from your mobile phone. This being done in descending order of PageView frequency - so the odds are that your favourite pages have already been converted.

There are a few "technology demonstrator" pages - these are deliberately very simple so the techniques can be seen without complications of presentation. See http://www.isham-research.co.uk/quattro/paint.html for a simple menu tree example tested down to 132x176 pixels and also fully usable on a normal display. Overall the goal is to provide just one set of pages that can be served to conventional displays and reduced dimension displays. Crucially, technological advances in handheld capability are making the subsetting initiatives such as W3C Mobile Web Best Practices rapidly obsolete.

The site has been accessed by an iPhone but this will NOT be fully supported until Apple sorts the iPhone browser out.

For the technically minded:

• Few (and small) images, no Macromedia Flash, no sounds.
• No frames.
• No table layouts, spacer .GIFs, etc.
• No aminated .GIFs.
• No pop-ups or pop-unders.
• No off-page adverts loaded.
• No cookies.
• Scripts and style sheets externalized.
• Bandwidth reduction via extended handset caching.
• Monolithic pages broken down to simple hierarchical structures:
  • Quicker load times on slower connections.
  • Reduced memory requirement.
  • Less scrolling.
  • Reduced redisplay time after 'back' function.
• Relative addressing permits the site to be stored in, e.g., an MMC card for offline use.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2 markup - single CSS with media blocks - for browser compatibility.
• HandHeldFriendly meta tag enables JavaScript and tables on AvantGo and other browsers.
  (This is also used by the isham research XML Sitemap Generator to produce mobile sitemaps)
• No fixed dimension layouts - no pixel counts, etc. (W3C Best Practice overtaken by browsers)
• Telephone numbers as links in WTAI form - click on the number to set up a call.
• Tested down to 132 pixel width.