|
Design Tip:
Meet The Wireless Internet
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Until just a few years ago, the wireless (or mobile) Internet existed only in the imagination, but the future has arrived. Millions of consumers worldwide have eagerly embraced wireless Internet technology. In the United States market though, competing standards, costs, slow speeds, and lack of design tools have hindered growth.
Nevertheless, the industry is growing rapidly. Many Web developers are responding to that growth by learning the basics of wireless design.
Pick A Card, Any Card
Wireless Internet basics include some important new terms:
WAP: Wireless Access Protocol is the technology that links wireless devices (mobile phones, pages, PDA's, etc) to the Internet. WAP provides the capability to translate information downloaded from the Internet into a format that mobile devices can understand.
WML: Wireless Markup Language. Relatively new (1999) programming language similar to HTML, but with less functionality and a much stricter format. Supports limited graphics (monochrome bitmaps but no animated GIF's or streaming video).
Deck of Cards: WML's method of organizing information into manageable chunks. In WML, there's no such thing as a "page." Rather, the information is organized into cards (roughly comparable to Web pages) and a complete collection of cards is called a deck.
WMLScript: The wireless version of JavaScript that lets programmers add functionality to their WML pages. Currently, WMLScript must be saved in a different file than plain WML, so a single card may have several files associated with it.
Gateway: The WAP gateway is the intermediary between the mobile network and the Internet. The wireless device sends Web page requests to the gateway. The gateway converts that request into an HTTP request. When the page is returned, the gateway translates the HTTP request back into a WAP request and forwards the information to the mobile network.
WAP Design Issues
Before you begin designing wireless pages, you need to understand some of the problems that WAP developers and wireless consumers face.
- Broken Links and Coding Errors: Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing calls "broken links and badly coded sites" one of the top problems for network operators worldwide.
A study by AnywhereYouGo.com found that 19.2% of wireless portals contained broken links. Another AYG study found a 28% error rate among applications, with some errors severe enough to prevent users from accessing the application.
Exhaustive site testing is crucial to the success of your wireless page design.
- Competing Standards: Much of this high error rate is due to the myriad of standards coming from competing providers. At present, interoperability is as elusive a dream as world peace. Generally, a wireless Internet device will only run the application of a single service provider so a user is locked into whatever service comes with his particular phone, PDA, or pager. It's as if you needed one television to watch CNN but had to purchase a different one to access MSNBC programming.
Wireless developers have to design pages that are compatible with many different gateways that all support different types of equipment running many different browsers, software, and protocols.
- Text-based displays: Wireless screens are considerably smaller than even the smallest laptop display, so designs need to be simple, easy-to-understand, and fast. Remember: many users pay by the minute and don't have the time or the money to wait for your complex graphics to download. They just want information delivered quickly and in an easily accessible format.
- Limited functionality: A cell phone keypad just can't compete with a keyboard for ease of use. A Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) usability study completed in the fall of 2000 found that it takes an average wireless customer 2.7 minutes to check the weather forecast and 2.6 minutes to check a TV listing.
Keep that keypad in mind when you design pages that require user input. Try to limit the amount of information that needs to be entered by hand. Checkboxes, radio buttons, and select lists work best.
- Lack of Speed: At present, wireless Internet connections are very slow. Remember 9600-baud modems? Well, that's the average wireless connection speed. Until wireless providers are able to provide connection speeds comparable to home PC's, speed will continue to be a designer's most important constraint.
|
Experienced Web developers should be familiar with most of these design issues. After all, they've been dealing with different browser versions, slow connections, and plug-in issues for years. Designing for WAP applications is really just adapting to a slightly different set of limitations.
Writing WML Code
WML may be relatively new, but there are already developer resources to help you get started. AnywhereYouGo (AYG), an online community of wireless developers offers an excellent basic WML tutorial and many other developer resources at its Web site.
Coding in WML is not that much different than coding in HTML. Many tags are the same, but the format is slightly different. For instance, in WML, all tags must be closed. The optional closing paragraph tag in HTML is required by WML and image tags also have to be closed.
Most Web developers are familiar with HTML editors that simplify Web page coding. Well, there are WML editors available too: AYG provides links to 9 different WML editors - some are free.
You may be able to write WML using your existing HTML editor. Homesite supports user-defined tags so you can customize it for your WML pages. Nokia's WML Studio is a downloadable extension to the Dreamweaver editor and allows you to create WML applications in a WYSIWYG environment.
If you have a huge site to convert, check out the HTML-to-WML conversion utilities. Some promise to take an entire HTML Web site and convert it to WML. This seems like the quick and easy option, but remember that the display method for wireless devices is very different from a standard monitor. An HTML page that looks great on a 13" monitor may be all but unrecognizable when you convert it directly into WML. You may want to simplify your HTML page before you use one of these utilities.
Even if you write your WML code strictly by hand, you'll probably use a lot of your existing HTML site because the languages are so similar. Before you start with WML, make sure that your HTML code is clean. WML has a much stricter format so you can't rely on a forgiving browser to interpret your meaning correctly. NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox will scan your HTML code for errors. It's a quick and easy way to troubleshoot your existing pages and get pages ready for WML conversion.
Beyond The Marketing Hype
Consumers' expectations are high, but the actual level of service they receive is low - so far.
Nevertheless, the market should continue to grow quickly. Some of the more optimistic forecasts project that, within a few years, one out of every 12 people worldwide (500 million) will own wireless devices that can access the Internet. Almost every major Web site either has developed or is developing a wireless version of the site. Even the major U.S. Presidential candidates this year offered wireless versions of their Web sites.
Get familiar with the design concepts and constraints now and you'll be ready to tap into this new market as it matures.
|
