My first experiences with the "mobile web" on my cellphone were scarring. My Motorola V3C phone came with a crappy WAP browser that could render some normal HTML pages. If you don't know, WAP is some bastard child of HTML 4 (see the graph here) that uses WML for the page contents. It was made for the context of mobile phones that can display at best 4 lines of text in black and write.
As you would expect it, adoption of WAP was limited to those foolish enough to rewrite their web sites in a completely different markup language with no obvious way of testing it without a mobile phone.
The rationale behind WAP is that you can't obviously take today's standard HTML page (including Flash, JavaScript, and tons of browser hacks) and render it on a mobile phone. That, and web pages are now so large (typically 1MB to 4MB) that the costs of transferring that page to your mobile would be too high.
Still, rewriting entire web sites in WAP is too expensive, so it never cought on. As a result, almost all forms of "mobile web browsing" sucks, except maybe a few "smartphones" and Apple's iPhone. And even in those cases (where the CPU is fast enough to render full HTML pages), the cost of data plans are still ridiculously expensive.
The other solution, then, could be something as simple as a some kind of proxy that re-renders a complex HTML page into a form that smaller and simpler for any basic web browser. The most popular of those services is Skweezer. It works pretty well with most web sites, and the interface is quite clean and simple to use. There's also the startup T9space, with its own mobile-optimized versions of popular sites, but with generally bigger pages than Skweezer.
The ultimate "proxy" for mobile web browsing is Opera Mini. It is its own Java software that you install on your mobile phone and acts as a client to Opera's proxies. What happens then is that Opera's servers renders the web page, shrinks it down, and then sends it in a highly compressed form to the Opera Mini software on your mobile phone. Because of this remote rendering, the pages are smaller and more complete (with most CSS and even some JavaScript) than almost all other mobile browsers. And, somehow, it is free, without ads. You can try the live demo yourself before installing it. I consider Opera Mini as essential to reduce to a minimum my data plan fees.
Even with Opera Mini or with Skweezer, it's still valuable to go to web sites optimized for mobile phones. I found an amazing list of such sites on cantoni.mobi. Some of my favorite sites are Gmail for all my emails, Bloglines for my newsfeeds, Slashdot for tech news and Remember The Milk for my TODO lists. I also placed my "mobile" bookmarks on del.icio.us using the "HTML render" options to display the smallest page possible (see the HTML feeds documentation). The address is then shortened using Qurl, a TinyURL.com-clone that I prefer using.
And so, with all of this, mobile web starts to be usable and cheap enough to be a reality.
Published on January 2, 2008 at 09:40 EST
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