Re: WAP <Fuzzy is confused>

I have also been reading this thread with interest.  I never heard of WAP
until now and therefore I am not familiar with the issues, but here are my
thoughts related to the issues of mobil access.

Until recently, I have never worried about the size of the visitor's display
when designing my webpages. However, I did concern myself with the
horizontal resolution of the visitor's display so that the visitor would not
have to scroll horizontally.  I decided to try to design all my webpages for
the least common denominator which, before web TV,  was 640 pixels.  To
compensate for browser window scroll bars and the like, I usually tried to
limit the content of my page (tables, graphics or what have you) to be no
wider than 600 pixels.  Of course plain text was never a problem, it just
wraps very nicely within the user's window.

Now, let us say that we live in a perfect world and we don't have to worry
about a browser's capability or non-compliance to standards.  (We can only
dream)  I would then design my pages using the strict DTD (Document Type
Definition) and CSS and not rely on tables for the layout.  This would
render (pun intended <g>) my pages to be less dependent on the visitor's
display resolution and leave tables for what they were originally designed
for, tables!

You're probably wondering where the heck I'm going with all of this.  Let us
say that you have a strict table that contains stock market data relevant to
the customer's portfolio.  The table has many columns in it:  the stock's
name, current price, change in price from yesterday, the day's high price,
the day's low price, and finally, customer's current gain or loss.  Fitting
all this data into a conventional display shouldn't be a problem.  All of a
sudden, here comes somebody accessing that page with a cell phone. Yikes!
How does that work?  Does he or she have to scroll horizontally.  Does it
display at all?  Even if the cell phone's small screen size was able to
display 640x480 pixels, can you imagine how that would look?  You would need
a magnifying glass!  And I didn't even mention incorporating navigational
links yet.

With the advent of devices accessing the internet other than the
conventional computer, it seems to me that even when using *properly
written* strict HTML, that in and of itself won't be enough.  It will be
interesting to see how this plays out.

Finally, (hopefully you are not sleeping by now <g>) the web continues to
evolve from the early days of strictly textual content to today's
multi-media rich content.  When push comes to shove, pure information will
always be king and win out over presentation.  However, layout and
presentation are very important because humans are very visual in nature.
It's a widely known fact that we process information much better when it is
in a format other than raw data or plain text.  The architects of the web
understand this and embrace it.  Thus the importance and development of
technologies such as CSS, DHTML and XML.  Information is what the web is all
about.  Improving on how and where that information is presented is the
future.

It will be interesting to see how emerging mobil technologies play out and
blend with the current state of authoring web pages.

Just my $1.02 worth,
Steve :-)

> Hi Bill (et al),
>
> Thanks for the morning chuckle !
>
> I'm following this string pretty closely as I'll bet most of you are and
> when I ran across this line I just had to laugh out loud: ">> - we will
> have to depend more on content rather than graphics;"
>
> Hello ?!?!?!
>
> *Please* correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Internet (and web) have,
> since day one, been about content - not graphics -.
>
> Also (and again please correct me if I'm wrong here), *properly written*
> HTML doesn't give a hoot about screen size. It matters not a bit, until
you
> begin to _depend_ on graphics for content..
>
> So . . . I'm not really seeing the problem here. Would someone please
> "enlighten" me?
>
> TIA,
> Fuzzy

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