Webmaster's Guide to the Wireless Internet part 32. 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 | 282 Chapter 6 Web Clipping Design your application so that the minimum content needs to be downloaded over the air in response to a query. For example if your users are searching a library of books allow them to narrow their search by as many criteria title author genre publisher keyword as possible before retrieving results from a remote server. When you are sending content back to the device from your server you should link to pages within your WCA instead of sending content over the air whenever possible. Any content that does not change regularly should be stored on the device. Keep graphics to a minimum and store them locally on the device. Palm provides a specific meta tag Localicon for this purpose. Avoid sending images over the air wherever it is possible dynamically generated images are of course an exception . Remember A picture is worth a thousand words. Technically there is not a display limitation on the length of a Web clipping application page but realistically you should endeavor to display your content on one screen in order to limit the amount of scrolling that your users have to do. There is one limitation in terms of file size. Due to a system memory limitation no individual WCA page can exceed 63KB. Bear in mind that this page would be very large as this limitation refers to the compressed version of the page. The limitation on Web clipping application size is determined solely by the amount of memory you have on your handheld device. Regardless of any technical limitation to the size of your pages you should keep your HTML markup to a minimum. Every character counts including should avoid the use of tables where possible and refrain from gratuitous use of the font should also keep variable names limited to a minimum of characters. Furthermore we suggest that the values of select lists be an index as opposed to a text time that this saves your users will be greatly appreciated. Remember they are the ones paying .
