IBM Unveiling New Transcoder Technology

JavaNPerl writes "This Infoworld article states that IBM is about to beta a transcoder that would translate content based on the client. This may get rid of some of the headaches in coding HTML and JavaScript for different clients one day and also make more content available for handhelds. " It's like the Holy Grail - keep seeing glimpes of potential systems, but this sounds like it may be the real thing.

Comments

This is possibly very clever

[Tet]

I have to agree with those the others that have said it. Standards compliant HTML 4.0 *is* portable across different clients already.

What this may do (I couldn't tell from the article) is clean up dirty HTML to make it portable. If so, then yes, it's a fairly clever little piece of software.

It's not just limited to HTML, either, and may take input in a number of different formats (Word, PDF, SGML, XML, more?). The thing they have to ensure is that their transcoding backbone is extensible enough to cover all possiblities. If they fall into the trap of aiming for the lowest common denominator, it'll be doomed. Hopefully, IBM are smarter than that...

This is not for fixing javascript & html...

[visionik]

What IBM is really going for here is a way to adapt HTML information into things like WAP (www.wapforum.org) Wireless Markup Language for cell phones & wireless gizmos, and into VoiceXML (www.voicexml.org) for plane-old-telephone access.

HTML x.0 is NOT portable!

[konstant]

Many people are commenting that "clean" or "standards-compliant" HTML is already portable across sundry platforms, and therefore this product is only a crutch for sloppy content providers. This is absolutely not true! Having made many webpages myself, and two or three that actually see a lot of use, I know from experience that standard HTML is one of the least standardized lingos in computing.

The reason is quite simple: people don't upgrade their browsers. Look at www.gnu.org for pete's sake! That page is specifically designed to be Lynx 2.0 compatible because use of "novelty tags" like (included in the HTML 3.2 spec) will break those clients. As a result, the page is fairly ugly.

Choose an involved combination of "standard" tags and it's a fairly safe bet that Netscape 3.0 will display it differently than Opera, which will display it differently than IE4, which will display it differently than Netscape 4.5, etc, etc.

The human is the bottleneck. People don't see a powerful incentive to upgrade their browsers, so they don't. Hence webdesigners like Rob Malda spend weeks of headache time on making their pages BassAckwards 2.7 compliant.

This transcoder, if it works, will really be a boon.

-konstant