Webmaster's Guide to the Wireless Internet part 8. The Webmaster’s Guide to the Wireless Internet provides the Wireless Webmaster with all of the tools necessary to build the next generation Internet. Packed with the essential information they need to design, develop, and secure robust, e-commerce enabled wireless Web sites. This book is written for advanced Webmasters who are experienced with conventional Web site design and are now faced with the challenge of creating sites that fit on the display of a Web enabled phone or PDA | 42 Chapter 1 Moving from the Web to Wireless Above all the major shift in perspective required of the wireless Webmaster is to realize that you re authoring for a mobile audience not just mobile devices. Rather than simply using portable devices visitors to your site may actually be on the move whether walking down the street or in a vehicle. They re probably not donating 100 percent of their attention to the screen and likely only have one hand for navigation. In this situation the browsing model of the wired Web will not work. Users need simplified quick access to just the information they need in a concise format that downloads quickly. This is not simply a matter of shortening text and optimizing graphics successful mobile Web sites need to provide mobile users immediate access to just the information they need when they need it from anywhere and from any device. Moving from the Web to Wireless Chapter 1 43 Summary The wireless Web represents a revolution in access to online information that will have profound impact on our society greater even than the Internet revolution of the past decade. Although the skills learned by Webmasters over the short but tumultuous life of the Web will provide a solid foundation for this new world new skills will have to be developed and some old habits changed. The sheer variety of different mobile devices is the first big change a Webmaster will have to deal with making the browser wars of the last few years seem like child s play. However you ll find that devices fall into a few general families with similar characteristics simplifying the presentation task somewhat. Device detection coupled with on-the-fly server-side generation of markup is one way to solve this problem. Here XML transformed to appropriate markup via XSL provides a future-proof option. How users connect to your site can be as important as which device they use. The majority of current mobile devices are limited to wireless speeds of between
