Mobile Web Development

Chapter 4: Adapting to User Devices

Book cover

This is a sample chapter of the book "Mobile Web Development" published by Packt Publishing. This chapter discusses the issue of adapting a mobile site to different mobile devices. Why adaptation is needed? This is because mobile devices have very different capabilities. For example, mobile devices have many different screen sizes. To give the best browsing experience to the users, you may want the server to determine the screen size of mobile devices dynamically and resize images to suit the screens.

At the beginning of this chapter, you will learn what adaptation is, why you would want to adapt a mobile site to different mobile devices, and what options are available to you if you decide to adapt. Then the author introduces two open source tools to you, WALL and WURFL. WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library) is an open source tag library that dynamically transforms markup to WML, XHTML, cHTML, etc, to suit the user's mobile device. WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) is an open source XML file for detecting mobile devices and their capabilities. The last section of the chapter introduces some other free, open source tools that are useful for adaptation. Examples include GAIA Image Transcoder, PHP Image Rendering Library, MyMobileWeb and HAWHAW.

More details of the book "Mobile Web Development" can be found from the following web pages:

If you want to buy a copy of the book, you may go to Packt Publishing's web site: http://www.packtpub.com/mobile-web-development/book.