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Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet?
aws910 writes "Reuters is running an article on how flashy web design is impacting the usability of internet-enabled mobile devices, with quotes from Tim Berners-Lee. Although the article is sparse on details, it is an interesting topic for discussion. Having recently bought an internet-enabled cellphone, I can honestly say that most websites are painful to view on a 240x320 screen over a GPRS connection(EVDO is expensive/US-only). Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"
Is there that big of a market for mobile internet to have sites double design, one for PCs, one for 320x240 mobile internet devices? I know very few people that use things like that. Usually to check weather and the sports scores.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"
I don't see this as really being a problem. People don't really browse the internet with handheld devices (phones, PDAs, etc) actually attempting to REPLACE their computer. People only want to be able to check their stocks or recent headlines. When the content you want to look at is just a dozen lines of text, a PDA is more than adequate. If you want to browse a page that is designed for 1600x1200 resolutions, chances are that the page ISN'T something you need to check right away, and can wait until you get to your computer.
I just wrote a text only portal to the information I need using Nokia's Python SDK for Symbian 60.
:)
It screen scrapes the sites I'm interested in and just returns the stuff I *want* to know : local cinema showings, a few RSS feeds, my current bank balance - that sort of stuff
More work than most people will do but makes me happy
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Web designers should have been worrying about 56k speeds all along. Not everybody happens to have broadband yet, and even if they do, why should you bleed it all away with huge flash files, etc. If you have to add splash and flash, perhaps your message isn't as good as it could be.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, really, is anyone at all surprised that smaller screens and lower bandwidth is slower and chunkier?
I've tried using my cell to use the internet, and it took only a few moments to decide it was for emergency use only. Both because it's almost useless and that the providers want to gouge so much for it in the first place.
We've been moving in that direction ever since more and more idiots have decided I can't see any of their site without flash or some equally annoying browser technology. Gearing for slower links with older technology has been on the decline since someone pointed out it should be done.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I also just bought an internet-friendly cell phone (Treo 650), and I'm figuring out which sites want me to visit them while I'm on the run (Google and Southwest airlines, to name two off the top of my head) and those that don't (weather.com).
Either produce a mobile-friendly version of your site - which shouln't be the end of the world, considering that most major sites these days are run by content management systems, or let the viewers go to your competitors. Automatic browser detection would be nice, but I can handle typing "mobile" or whatever instead of "www".
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
How about when you don't have one available? Waiting for a flight, sitting on the subway or whatever?
So until businesses are punished for their lack of interoperability with mobile devices, this will always be the case.
And it's unlike they'll ever be punished because device manufacturers have the onus to interoperate with bad sites, not vice versa.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
IMO, broswing website using some silly little contraption is silly. Just view the sites on a regualr computer when it's more convenient. Or, every web designer should use CSS and have a handheld-friendly CSS option.
Or webdesigners can take the time to make websites that have slimmed down versions (text only Google News, Slashdot's lite (or completely customizable version, various sites that offer WAP detection).
I have a little utility that I wrote for geocachers to convert words to numbers via the "dollar word method". A guy I know complained that it wouldn't render on his WAP phone. I spent the 10 minutes using Google to figure out how to write it to work w/WAP and how to get Apache to detect WAP and rewrite the URLs.
Is it really that hard to do? Do we really need Flash and 100k page loads for a simple website?
No, we don't and it's not silly when you are sitting on the bus or train or in the mall waiting for your SO to shop.
Be serious.
Let me save you the suspense.
It's painful.
The problem is technical, and solvable: my newsbot for example offers a personalized list of top news articles formatted for PDA/mobiles. I am sure there are other services that go beyond news...
You might, but I sure won't. I don't want to try to compare various items I'm shopping for on such a tiny screen, etc. etc. I won't buy a device for browsing the web unless it can do at least VGA.
Why demand everyone in the internet re-write the content on all their sites because you are trying to use a bad device to view it? Should boat makers make all their boats tiny because you prefer bailing water with a thimble rather than a bucket? Use the right tool for the job, or don't complain when the wrong tool doesn't work as well as the right one.
Pulling down all of these websites on a Palm or PocketPC is very painful - my Treo 650 would take *forever* to load image-heavy Engadget, for instance. RSS is the perfect solution for the handheld. It allows you to quickly get a list of topics (text only, which is perfect for small screens) and then only load those pieces that interest you.
RSS is nice on the desktop. RSS is invaluable on the handheld.
Now if only a decent method of synchronizing multiple RSS clients could be developed (Bloglines doesn't cut it).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It seems plausible to think that the market forces will overpower (or otherwise direct) those of technology in this instance.
For example, do you think that Amazon will move to a simpler website design to accomodate relatively few mobile users? Or would they go to the trouble to create an alternate 'mobile-only' website?
The answer?
Yes, if the market demands for such a headache merit doing so.
Otherwise, I think the technology of mobile Internet will have to conform to the current market situation of flashy website designs.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
I can't believe a dozen comments have been posted all to the effect of "don't look at the net w/ handheld - flashy is good",
... maybe ... but how about just dishing up information?
Well, flashy sucks on handhelds or on a real computer. I almost feel like I'm back on a modem when I visit some sites which feel the need to pull their flashy ads of some distant server and won't display squat till that happens. Or sites that are FLASH only - sure it's neat once
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Swiss Army knife.. I can see specialized sites, news, weather and, I suppose, sports scores, offering separate pages optimized for phones, but it's silly, IMO, to think that the majority of sites are going to do this. I'm certainly not planning on doing that with the sites I'm responsible for.
Once again it's the old concept that I want my cell phone to be.....(gasp) just a phone and a good one. I don't need it to be a digital camera, or a can opener.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
If you stick to the standards you can easily make good looking sites that can scale any screen and browser.
Gimme some of that sweet, sweet crack.
Making overly-complicated pages did not start with the popularization of broadband. Think back to when frames were popular. I can't imagine how some of the framesets I saw eight years ago would render on a cellular phone screen. Many web designers are more artists than programmers, and this means that sacrifices of code readability and simplicity will always be made for the sake of the next big thing in style. Increased bandwidth only makes this problem worse by adding embedded objects and image-heavy sites.
Actually, the biggest reason SMS is so popular is cost. In most of Europe and Asia, the cost of a text message is a fraction of the per-minute charge for a voice call.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You're right. Using silly little contraptions is just plain silly. Well argued.
Anyway, I note that in Japan lots of sites, even personal 'me and my dog' pages, have mobile versions. Not surprising since there have been a lot of web-capable phones there for a long time. It's just a matter of market forces -- maybe a big enough pool of people with browser-equipped phones will build up in the US, maybe not.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The do what the cavemen did while they were waiting for their flights - sit down and shut up.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to have a cellphone shoved into your ear, or a web browser in your face 24/7.
umm.. Useless it is not. Usage of wireless web enabled devices is growing faster than the conventional delivery methods can handle.
As a full time web designer - I have made my services for developing websites for web enabled devices a high priority. With proper research and proper web design skills, developing websites for slow connections without Macromedia Flush is pretty straight forward.
What is really needed right now, especially for the Pocket PC platform (Which I feel is superior in every aspect compared to the kludge that is Palm OS)is Minimo development to progress at a faster rate. PPC IE browser is blech, and the only viable option for efficiency on the PPC platform right now is NetFront v3.1 for Pocket PC. Multimedia delivery via PPC Windows Media Player or Real Player is already in place and developing content for that format is pretty straight forward.
I only wish Qualcomm would get off its dead ass and develop Eudora for PPC instead of just Palm OS. I don't like the idea of using Outlook, but I will if it is necessary to do my work.
Well, there are times when there's no choice, such as when one is on the road or in a motel with no internet access or on site at a client's place of business where it's a security risk to touch their intranet terminals. Also, when at a factory, gas station, restaurant, rest stop on the highway... the list goes on and on. So, the suggestion of "just view the sites on a regualr [sic] computer" doesn't apply in every situation where one might need to access the world wide web.
I'm at the very low end of access speed; I've just started using my Palm T3 with a bluetooth phone to access web sites, with mixed results. To my surprise, the sites I have used (/., Y!News, Y!Quotes, dictionary.com, NE Journal of Medicine, google.com, etc.) have been pretty "format-friendly" so far. Vonage.com--forget it; the whole site's Flash.
I have found that by far the fastest way to browse is to ssh to my linux account and run lynx. This relieves the handheld of the responsibility to download tons of html formatting and graphics placeholders. Now if only this bluetooth phone-dialup ISP connection weren't so godawful slow it would be more useful. But, it's better than nothing.
Anyway, clearly there needs to be some more consciousness on the part of web site designers as to different screen sizes, but my experience has been not too bad.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
When I had my Internet enabled Nextel phone it was strictly used for cheating at trivia contests in the local bar.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's not about bandwidth, it's about usability.
...and that may be my one gripe with this article. It seems to be blaming web designers for the lack of functionality on mobile web access. While I think that may, in part, be true, that most mobile devices have low-resolution displays, very little processing power, and less-than-efficient interfaces, operating on overpriced, under-performing data networks is a much larger barrier for the use of mobile web access than just web design.
The permeation of flash-based advertising, unnecessarily-bloated UI design, and lack of consideration towards lower-resolution displays have put a damper on mobile web access.
I know it's at the point where I've recently canceled my unlimited data access on my Sony Ericsson S710a. Why? There just isn't anything to do with it.
Mobile web, right now, is basically about IM, sports scores, news, and very limited email and document handling, and that is the fault of the devices themselves, not web designers.
If you're using best practices -- stylesheets, semantic markup, alternative stylesheets where necessary, it shouldn't be a huge problem to have your site display well on a mobile device.
The one exception is that some of the more ambitious effects on sites like alistapart.org may be garbled on a reader that attempts to interpret css rules.
I'd also be concerned with the oncoming popularity of ajax effects on sites.
Makers of mobile browsers shouldn't be let off the hook either though -- each mobile browser should have an easily accessible stylesheet toggle so that the site information can be seen in lynxlike clarity if necessary.
<horse type="hobby">
The WWW is also useless on a real PC if you actually try to use the resolutions the PC is capable of. For instance my current PC/monitor combination can handle 2048x1536 resolution.
I tried that just the other day, and >90% of sites were just unusable, even if you increase the font size.
Then again, >90% is way better than the OS (MacOSX) and my actual applications which was 100% unusable...
Apple is just sitting on this revolutionary resolution independent windowing system, and they just won't let me use it as intended.
For gods sake, I just want 300 dpi monitor resolution, is that too much to as for? Especially from the company that popularized WYSIWYG?
</horse>I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
I've had a Treo 600 for a year and half, and have built a library of PDA friendly sites. Most of the big sites offer an alternative view through either a mobile. prefix on the domain or a /pda suffix to the main site.
Here are my most used sites from my phone:
http://www.mapquest.com/pda/maps.adp
http://wap.espn.com/
http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/
http://mobile.wunderground.com/
Seriously, when will people stop finding sh*t to complain about? Do you really need to view the webernet on your cellphone ? gimme a break.
Either way, you might want to consider that a good portion of potential viewers will go somewhere else if the word "Flash" appears in the first 30 seconds, or nothing at all appears in the first minute.(You can always have a link to the "Alternative, pointless, bandwidth intensive and painfully slow graphics version").
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
the topic is
sparse on det-
ails because
it needs to
fit into a mo-
bile phone
screen.
sulli
RTFJ.
The problem with alternate versions is cost. You're required to maintain a separate codebase for your slimmed down version, and you need to have enough potential earnings for that codebase for it to become feasible. Unless a considerable chunk of your clients for the regular version demand a trimmed down version or they will move to a competitor, there is no business case for supporting alternate platforms right now, due to low usage numbers.
Ofcourse, over time the use of the web on handheld platforms will become widespread enough for there to be a business case for supporting them, but as always, there is a case of chicken and egg.
Look at the history of CSS on the web. Tons of benefits, but as long as the vast majority wasn't using a CSS-supporting browser, there were few CSS-based sites, and most browser makers dragged their feet to implement a sprawling standard nobody used.
Also, I understand that there are a lot of slashdot users here who dismiss "flashy" websites, but make no mistake, flashiness is a feature that sells. Ofcourse, all flash and no function leaves you biting the dust. But if you have feature parity with your competitors and your competitors have a more attractive product, you will lose marketshare.
...I can't stand flashy websites that require plugins and bandwidth eating graphics to function. I have always made the effort to code only standards compliant, low bandwidth eating fast loading sites.
The company I work for has a large field contingent with often low bandwidth connections back to corporate so such design behavior is a must. If it can't be done with XHTML1.0/1.1, CSS1/2, and a little javascript (note a LITTLE javascript) than the design needs to be rethought.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If the regular internet paid more attention to bandwidth and standards, the mobile web would probably work just fine.
If a single page requires several hundred K and several plugins only available for a Commodore 64, you know who you are!
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
Well, in the states, we have very slow mobile internet. EDGE should help a bit. I do know verizon offers highspeed mobile internet but its way too damn expensive. For now mobiles will be limited because of their lackluster support of what many deem standard web practices. Flash and other multimedia won't be going away anytime soon. Mobiles even have a hard time with javascript at least the ones I've used. Ever try to pull up local.google.com
and get directions? Well it just doesn't work. Google forcibly tries to redirect to a WAP site because its better suited for less capable devices. For now that sadly includes mobile phones. Though I will jump for joy when we will be able to sustain broadband speeds from a phone. Then i'll be one of those people who uses their cell phone as a modem in remote locations. But even then it may be a futile attem considering the way Wi-Max may turn out.
Any site that puts out content that doesn't have special formatting and alternate content for handhelds also probably doesn't have it for the sight-impaired, or others with special accessibility requirements. It's not really that hard to do and no one has an excuse to not do it.
Actually, a CSS redesign of Slashdot has been offered, although there would be lots of heavy lifting to get it into slashcode. This part 2 of an article on /. redesign shows how /. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.
(Part 1)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Yes, good idea, because as everyone knows, web designers have all the time in the world to design a bunch of different versions of a single site, and of course, their employers & clients are always willing to pay to develop all that for a ridiculously small percentage of people hitting the site with a cellphone.
It'll be nice if, one day, people realize the vast majority of professional website designers have very little say-so in what goes online. "Design it this way."
Gah.
What I found an order of magnitude much more useless is the design of sites which are 99% container and 1% content. Why should we bother beefing up our browsing devices for such a nuisance?
Just for example, last night I was about to order chicken on the internet. The restaurant's site insisted to show me an animated introduction, then open a multi-frames colorful page with ads on specials and how good is their chickens. Not only it requires Flash to order chicken, but you need also a fast connection for all the images. It crashed twice during the process, I decided to go out and bring some sushis. Should it be so complicated to order chicken?
Of course, I may used phone, however, in this specific case, I was using my phone line to surf from a location having only a 56Kbps connection.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I use the internet on my mobile. Email is obviously fine. General browsing can be a bit awkward and slow, but my main use - looking up IMDB reviews while in the shop DVD section - is great.
The idea of walking home to look up a bit of info is (or "can be" and "should be") as retarded in today's society as needing to find a phone box to tell someone you'll be a bit late.
People like clean, simple interfaces. Why do page designers always insist on flashy designs? The flashier it is, the more it looks like an advertisement. When important GUI elements are disguised with flashy colors and graphics to attract attention, they look like advertisements and you end up looking all over for them and not finding them.
The internal HR web site for my company isn't even usable in Mozilla; the major navigation "tabs" near the top of the screen are visible only in IE. In any other browser they appear sunken, like gravestones after a flood, so you can see only a few rows of pixels at the very top edge of each tab. You have to keep waiting while the page convulsively realigns itself as the flashy images load. If I see one more stock photo of people smiling at computers, I'm going to vomit.
As for my phone (mMode), forget it. You can enter an arbitrary URL but I have yet to find one that doesn't give an error message. It can't load even something simple like a blog. If there's a column at the left, right, or top with images from adservers, it always chokes on those. By default the phone dumps you into a menu-based structure where you can browse news, sports, or "what's hot", and from what I can tell, if you're looking for news, sports, or "what's hot" it's great. That's never what I've needed it for though. I tried doing a white pages search on the road once- surely that must be possible- and gave up after 20 minutes after getting errors from both Yahoo and MSN. I ended up using a "low tech solution": calling my wife at home and asking her to do the white pages search for me from her PC.
With all of the RTFM and RTFA retorts around here, I think the best solution to a boring wait is to RTF whatever. Better still, read a book.
Are we getting so wired that we can't just sit still with a bound book and read for half an hour?
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
Yet another example of how these page layouts aren't "Web design", but "graphic design" for the Web. Or not really for "the Web", but rather for "IE 5.0 and more or less other apps that work kinda like it". Graphic designers are just starting to hit the hard limits of their "discipline" that industrial designers hit in the early 20th Century. When "designed" objects had to "work", and work with other designed objects not desigend as one combined object. We came up with "system design", which graphic designers haven't even considered since Churches in the Renaissance. Graphic design as a subset of graphic art, rather than encompassing art and related function, is an accident waiting to happen.
At a degree of complexity, esthetics and function part ways. When we're lucky, esthetics catches up eventually. With the Web, too much graphic design rushed ahead without regard to functional requirements. The Mobile Web is the first major change in the Web platform, and the graphic "design", or lack of it, is cracking under the strain.
--
make install -not war
Well, if your site clearly seperates its data from its presentation (come on, CSS isn't a new technology now), it would be incredibly easy to just fashion up a new barebones stylesheet. If it's difficult, then your design is broken and you should have written it correctly from the beginning.
Sorry to be harsh, but it's 2005 now. These concepts aren't new, and it shouldn't be difficult to make a bare-bones view of the same site after you've designed for that all-important client.
I run the website for a local company, and creating a plain-text stylesheet with basic colors and lines would take me all of 15 minutes.
I suspect more developers would be coding their pages for wireless devices if it were a simple task. CSS makes it fairly straight-forward, but there are very few nice WAP browsers for the desktop. There's a project called Mobilizer but it's development activity is slow if anything. More work in this area will be necessary before any real progress will be seen.
RSS is nice on the desktop. RSS is invaluable on the handheld.
Y'know, this is really what phone users AND web developers ought to be worried about in this area. Many web site front pages are not just graphics-heavy, they're text-heavy. Like a newspaper, they put a little of everything new and interesting on the front page at once, hoping at least something will catch your eye and draw you inside. No handheld or phone, no matter how elegantly designed, is going to be able to display that much text at once in a way that humans can process it. Period.
RSS is a perfect solution. It gives you just the headlines and/or first few lines of the article, with no graphics and only the most important text. Then you can either scroll to the next one or ask for more information. There's a zillion RSS clients for desktops, but really it's the handhelds and phones that should be embracing it.
Does every news site out there use RSS? No, but I'm willing to bet it's a much higher number than the number of sites with small-screen versions. Besides, RSS is a one-way device--if you want to search for information, you need a web form, and that's a little more work to design. But for cryin' out loud, I'd rather wait for a phone-sized version of a search engine than try to use a desktop-sized one.
Frankly speaking dude, a person who calls themselves a "web developer" and is making 283K homepages is part of the problem. That's bigger than CNN's.
Badmouthing people for your inability to control your page bloat, just shows that your maturity as a developer is lacking in more areas than just efficiency.
And contrary to popular belief, there is nothing wrong with having 24/7 access to tremendous volumes of information. You can do research on just about any subject from just about anywhere. That is an amazing gift that technology has given us. Just because it is different than the way it used to be done, doesn't make it bad.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
the filtering is done server side, the SDK is just used to get the files and display them, a bit like a web browser but a dedicated Symbian app, using a URI to build the menus from a text file
here's an example
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
What was the John Cusack film that he made before Identity? I wanted to know. I was at the video store, pulled out my web-enabled phone, went to my phone webform http://af2k.com/mpt/imdb.asp, which borrows from imdb.com/Find and asked... the answer choked my phone.
I was in a Karaoke bar, gearing up to sing "Wildflower" by Skylark, so I surfed onto google to review the lyrics. Worked great.
Mini-browsers are like swiss army kives. If you have one, you will find legit uses for them... <BLINK>IF</BLINK> the pages are NOT choked with crap.
PS: No, I didn't REALLY try to use blink tags
" The problem with alternate versions is cost."
Cost is a double edged sword when you are looking at future business models. In the past 6 months, my company has been visited by big-wigs from every major wireless provider in the US desperatly seeking the killer app that will increase wireless airtime usage.
Yet, even today, I still can't whip out my mobile and easily check weather, news, or plan a trip (to include reserving tickets). All of things could be done 3 years ago in Japan. And this time it wasn't due to any magical Japanese techno glory. It was simply just that the mobile providers partnered with content providers to make the phones tools that could be used for every aspect of life.
As long as we are stuck with this crappy SMS messaging (seriously, how hard is it to have full email to a phone...it's just data), and no content to make the web browser in my phone anything more than an amusement that get's old in 5 minutes, product cycles are going to stay rediculously slow and we will remain two to three years behind Japan and Europe.
Simply put, for the younger crowd, the cell phone has got to become a status symbol due to cool features (we're starting to get there), and for the older crowd, it has got to be a tool that goes beyond just being able to make a phone call away from home. Once the carriers satisfy both of these markets, we will start to see a consumer drive to have the latest features which will in turn push competition in handset design.
The phone providers don't need a new killer app, they just need some basic organized content worth looking at.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Well, there is a group of people that should have a cellphone shoved up their ---.
And to the other poster: When I'm travelling, I use a device called a "book". It has great battery life, but doesn't deal well with water. On trips over two hours, I bring two.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I know I'm saying egg and you're saying chicken, but I've seen too many people excited and subsequantly annoyed by their mobile web browsers. My boss is one of these guys. He never surfs on his phone except to one site, our corporate Outlook Web Access site. No, he'd never go to the full size one, but he loves the Outlook Mobile Access version. Why? It's light, it loads fast and it gives him the info he needs (it's plain text for those not familiar).
If you designed your sites like this, people would flock to them. I regularly use several small sites but avoid the big ones like the plague. Slashdot happens to have a pretty good small site that I visit often (add the ability to view more comments!) but the regular site is a pain.
TW
Have a look at www.pdaportal.com for a great list of mobile-friendly web sites.
You can even customize it.
Opera scales both text & images (even Flash) through its unique Zoom function.
;)
It's also the best browser out there anyway. And if you're too cheap to pay a few $$ to use the web the way you want when you've coughed up $hundreds on a monitor, quit complaining.
Until then, we're stuck using something like AvantSlash which actually formats the page in a way that is not only readable on an offline client but on a PDA and WAP browser.
The quicker Slashdot moves to XHTML+CSS, the quicker we can get away from crufty hacks like this to get handheld friendly content.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Just view the sites on a regualr computer when it's more convenient.
Except that it's not. I travel a fair bit professionally, often internationally, and when I'm on the road I use my Palm Tungsten T3 to check email and check information on a few vital websites. (Weather, Airline status, maps and a few others are invaluable) It is HIGHLY inconvenient for me to use my laptop, much less my desktop, whenever I'm on the road or in meetings. If you sit at your desk all day (nothing wrong with that), then being able to use the web on your PDA/phone probably isn't useful. But for those of us who don't, being able to use the web to get driving directions when I'm in the middle of nowhere is invaluable.
Fortunately many websites have a PDA friendly version of their site. Accuweather, Amazon, American Airlines (and several other airlines), Mapquest, eBay, Hollywood.com, UPS, FedEx, Slashdot and my broker all have Palm friendly versions which are very light and work great. I connect my T3 through a Nokia 6310i using Cingular. Has worked great in the US, Mexico and parts of Southeast Asia. (expensive overseas though...) Data packages are still overpriced but competition is bringing the cost down.
Anyway the point is, just because it isn't useful to you personally doesn't mean it isn't useful period. For those of us who spend a lot of time on the road, the mobile internet can be a godsend.
I spend *a lot* of time on the web on my Treo 600. The only way to make it useable is to turn off image loading. The text (which is usually what I want anyway) comes up quickly, and is quite readable even on a 160x160 screen.
"Print is dead" - Egon
It's not the medium, it's the content.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As someone who actually reads (and posts on) Slashdot from a mobile device, including right now, let me tell you this:
1: You need a device with a keyboard. The Treo and iPaq are OK, the Blackberry is better, and the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) is perfect.
2: You need a big screen.
3: You need a good browser. This leaves the Treo with Blazer (kind of - it's not the fastest) and the Hiptop. The iPaq is OK if you load NetFront (Pocket IE sucks). The Blackberry just doesn't cut it.
So, we're left with the Sidekick / Hiptop. It's the only mobile device that I will carry. It's what I just wrote this post on.
Most pages work great. Some don't. But *every* page is unusable unless you have a large screen and a good browser.
Slashdot, by the way, works ideally on my Sidekick.
I've been thinking about how to best design a web site to solve this problem. For dynamic web sites, alternate "views" of the site could be automatically selected for different web browsers -- as long as there is sufficient separation between the content and the presentation. Maybe CSS could help, too.
So how do you find out how to get home when you're flight's been over booked and you're landing in a different airport 200 miles from where you started?
I don't just browse the web for fun. I use it as my main reference library.
It would be a lot easier to bring the web to handheld devices if the makers of such devices supported standards consistently or completely. As the css-discuss page on handheld stylesheets confirms, support is often patchy or non-existent.
Every web user knows, along with Jakob Nielsen, that clean and simple web page design is best. However, every corporate web page designer knows that flashy and graphics-laden is the only way to go. Ever since the <img> tag was invented, these two worldviews have been for all intents and purposes irreconciliable. It'd be truly lovely if something could persuade the corporate designers of the www to KIS,S, but I'm not holding my breath...
Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.
First, if you actually wrote a proper website in the first place, you do NOT need to create or maintain two versions. This is a myth perpetrated by incompetent self-styled "designers" that never bothered to learn to understand the media they're working in.
If you made a godawful pile of crud instead of a webpage, then you shouldn't make a new, good version and maintain them both, you should make a new, good version and delete the crud.
So for people that have proper websites, the costs involved are very close to nonexistent. And those that don't, should really get one anyway, mobile phones or no mobile phones. So this is all a red herring.
There is definately a business case for making your site as accessible and useful as possible for as many of your customers as possible. There's also a great business case for supporting early adopters. If you're the first, it's a great strategic move. If you're not the first, you'll wind up following a little later, and not having as good a position. The business case is there. The fact that it involves old fashioned capitalist principle of offering value to the consumer instead of conforming to the Enron philosophy of grab the money and run prevelant with management folks in the US these days doesn't mean it doesn't make business sense - just that the US corporate management culture isn't particularly agile or smart.
You're quite correct that, all other things being equal, it's an advantage to have shiny-pretty. But the notion that you have to choose between pretty on the one hand and correct and accessible on the other. That's simply not true. And a website that has functionality problems, that relies on things like flash (you CAN use flash without relying on it, it's not very difficult, but using it improperly without providing for graceful degredation is what I'm talking about here) or is simply very poorly written, no matter how pretty it may appear when first loaded up in the most popular browser, isn't going to do the company behind it any favours in the long run.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Rutgers University has a somewhat nifty website called www.whereismybus.com that is supposed to display the location of Rutgers buses in semi-realtime. This is needed because the Rutgers bus system is horribly fucked up and inconsistent, and it's nice to be able to know that the bus you're waiting for won't show up for 40 minutes when your destination is only 20 minutes away on foot (admittedly though not-so-nice parts of campus...)
Problem: The site is heavily dependent on JavaScript and ActiveX. Not only is it useless on mobile devices, it's useless on any non-Windows machine.
The end result: The people who need the information the most (students freezing their asses off at bus stops) have no way to access the information from their phones, no matter what capabilities the phones may have.
Typical Rutgers. Why the hell did I choose to go here for grad school?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Sounds like "you" did a bad job of informing the client, and are letting him make a bad decision because he's not informed.
Now the customer has the right to make bad decisions. And if you need the money (and who doesn't) then I can certainly understand implementing what they want, even when it is stupid. But I think you have a responsibility, as a professional, to inform the client so he can make an informed decision, which is what was not done.
In this case, I'd point out that WAP users are a fast growing market, that they are likely to be better than average in terms of buying power, yes, but also that relying entirely on this flash gizmo for whatever it's doing is slamming the virtual door to your internet presence right in the face of many customers or potential customers, not just the WAP users but also the blind, those who for whatever reason still use an older browser, as well as the many who simply refuse to install or enable a flash plugin because we don't want that crap . All those groups together are probably going to be a minority of users, but it's not an insignificant one, and it really seems like bad business to me to deliberately and needlessly slam your door in their face, particularly when it's unecessary.
Then I would simply point out that I can use the flash and get what the customer wants, but still have a site that is accessible and functional to everyone.
That's assuming the conversation ever came up in the first place. But why would it? The client wants a flash doo-hickey? Fine. Give him one. Just do it right....
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I disagree. While content is certainly important, medium is equally valuable.
There is something almost spiritual about the printed word. You get a better feel for the content when you can feel the paper, the binding, even the ink across the page if you try hard enough.
Samuel T. Cogley in the ST:TOS episode "Court Martial" said it best:
"Don't you like books?"
"Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space."
"A computer, huh? I got one of these in my office. Contains all the precedents, a synthesis of all the great legal decisions written throughout time. - I never use it."
"Why not?"
"I've got my own system. Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn't so important, I'd show you something-- my library. Thousands of books."
"What would be the point?"
"This is where the law is, not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized - Do you want to know the law, the ancient concepts in their own language, Learn the intent of the men who wrote them, from Moses to the tribunal of Alpha 3? Books."
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.