Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Support for standards

The significant development in mobile browsing technology is the abandonment of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and its authoring language WML (Wireless Markup Language) in favor of the same web authoring standards set forth by the W3C for web content. The Open Mobile Alliance (http://www.openmobilealliance.org), the organization that guides standards for the mobile industry, has been working in cooperation with the W3C to ensure that web technologies take into account the needs of the mobile environment. In fact, the W3C has formed the Device Independence Working Group (http://www.w3c.org/2001/di) to promote access to a “unified Web from any device in any context by anyone.”

Modern mobile phones and other handheld devices will support XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML minus the tags that don’t make sense for the mobile environment), ECMAScript Mobile Profile, Wireless CSS, SVG Tiny (a version of Scalable Vector Graphics especially for mobile devices), among other standards. This is big news, because web content developers no longer need to learn a special language to make content accessible to the growing mobile audience. The devices may also continue to support less strictly authored HTML pages as well as legacy WML.