Hi,
Making a website "magically" work on all mobile phones is certainly
not as easy as "flicking a switch". Despite the widespread belief
among developers that have not actually worked with mobile browsers,
even serving a scaled-down XHTML-MP version of the markup would not
solve the problem fully. There is still huge fragmentation among
device manufacturers, browser software developers, and network
operators, which means there is a wide variety of support (or lack of)
for markup standards. This means a developer has to adapt her markup
to various subsets of cHTML, WML, and XHTML-MP based on the User-Agent
accessing the site.
If someone were to undertake such a project for mediawiki, I'd suggest
using libraries such as WURFL (
wurfl.sf.net), a project which attempts
to document devices' capability trees in a structured fashion, and
WALL-4-PHP (wall.laacz.lv), a project which uses the WURFL to adapt
the output markup based on the client's User-Agent. This would require
building a skin that uses WALL-4-PHP's tag markup exclusively.
Another approach is to use an existing transcoder that makes a
best-effort to convert web pages into markup that will render on the
phone. Two examples are Skweezer (commercial) and Phonifier (open
source):
-- Skweezer:
http://www.skweezer.net/
http://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx/-/en~wikipedia~org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allis…
-- Phonifier:
http://www.phonifier.com/
http://www.phonifier.com/phonify.php?i=1&m=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wiki…
Because mediawiki's output markup is well structured, both transcoders
do a very good job of transcoding the markup.
Anyway, those are my $0.02. I've dealt extensively with mobile browser
incompatibility and the headaches of multiserving N-markups for mobile
content, and I don't think this problem is as simple as people are
making it out to be.
Best,
Garth
On Dec 19, 2007 10:24 AM, Joseph Hagerty <revjoe(a)revjoe.com> wrote:
As I am interested as well:
When you say basic support is already there, what are you thinking of? As I
look at it, it would require more than just a stylesheet, especially as many
handhelds default to having style sheets turned off (e.g. my blackberry 8830
). The way I see it, we would want to do something like detect the browser
on page load and swap themes from normal "monobook" (or whichever) to a
theme and style sheet designed for handhelds.
Given that, I agree, it should not be too complicated, but one question I
would have is the appropriate place to put the check for browser type. Is
there a hook that would be appropriate?
Joseph Hagerty
-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Frederik Dohr
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 10:18 AM
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] WAP ?
I posted to this list to effectively suggest a
feature - native
support for WAP/mobile versions built into the MediaWiki software.
Basic support is already there - all that's needed is a style sheet.
This couldn't be that hard to do.
Someone would still have to do it - remember that this is an open-source
project developed in great part by volunteers.
-- F.
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