A Skeptic’s View On Google’s Intent To Deprecate And Freeze The User-Agent Header
Adding favicons in a multi-browser multi-platform world
Fixit – Valid Markup
March 8, 2007, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
This test runs an XML parser on your document to check if your page validates against its specified schema. A schema (or DTD) constrains the structure and content of an XML document. An XML document which is well-formed and which complies with its schema is said to be valid. Put simply, the schema specifies rules about the structure and content of a document, and your document must follow these rules (as well as general XML well-formedness rules). If the XML parser finds something wrong with your document, then an error message will be displayed. Some errors cause the parser to stop dead in its tracks, while some errors are not so serious, and the parser can continue... Read More
dotMobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide
March 8, 2007, by ronan
I am proud to announce we recently posted the dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide on mobiForge. This is quite a comprehensive guide to mobile web development. It layers on the advice from the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 document, but takes it further... Read More
SXSW goes mobile
March 7, 2007, by James Pearce
Cool .mobi site alert! We don't blog enough about great .mobi sites that we come across, so it's probably about time we should. http://sxsw.mobi is one that seems totally worthy of coverage. (South by Southwest is a series of media, film, and music festivals) As the site itself says, SXSW.mobi is "South by Southwest's new adventure in mobile content delivery". Being a Brit, I'm hoping the BBC gives it some coverage too... Read More
Client-Server 101
Client-Server 101 Server side technologies have been about for a good, long while. While once Perl-CGI was the platform of choice today we have an often bewildering range of languages, application servers and databases to choose from when developing for the World Wide Web. With the advent of the mobile Web, one of the questions that periodically crops up is can we use those same technologies for this new medium? The short answer is yes and shame on you for asking... Read More
How to be Massively Multiplayer and Mobile
How to be Massively Multiplayer and Mobile Ask your average man on the Clapham omnibus what has been successful in the mobile sphere and he'll probably tell you ringtone and game downloads. With the launch of the iPhone, ringtones have reached their natural destination of turning mobile phones into portable music players, but games have largely remained static, offering the same tried and tested platform and Space Invader style games. This, of course, is almost certainly about to change in the near future... Read More
The Importance of Mobile Pre-Emptive Navigation
February 5, 2007, by admin
One thing that often tends to get forgotten in the information architecture of mobile sites is pre-emptive navigation - essentially giving the site the intelligence to guess where you're likely to go and build a shortcut for you. Why is this important? Well, hierarchical navigation trees are all very fine and dandy, but if you have to return to the server to fetch the next sub menu seven or eight times before getting to the content you want, you're probably not going to bother. Other than having to wait for deck after deck to load, data charges are just too high to comfortably spend on downloading intermediary menus... Read More
Mobile first, Web Second
As someone who's been as much immersed in the business as the technical end of the mobile Internet for the last few years, I'll have to admit that it is often not an easy sell to clients. By clients I'm referring to businesses, big and small and in-between, rather than OpCos - the operators themselves - who frankly deserve a rant of their own, so I'll stick to the former here. The problem has it's origins in the original launch of WAP and how marketing bunnies around the World promised "the Internet on your phone" and how, when we instead got an often unreliable teletext service with poor content, the public, unsurprisingly, turned against the idea. You'd think we'd learned from our mistake. Unfortunately this is often not the case... Read More
Comparison of CSS 2.1, CSS MP, WCSS and CSS Level 1
January 18, 2007, by Jo Rabin
This tables summarizes the differences between the different flavours of CSS that are in use and is a useful reference for developers who are making the transition from from PC web design to mobile web design. Version 0.9 (Draft), 29 Jan 2007 Jo Rabin Some references are works in progress and are subject to change... Read More
Creating Mobile Sites in Drupal Using Multisites
January 18, 2007, by admin
This article provides a quick way to make your Drupal site accessible to mobile devices through two options: Have a one site serve multiple devices using one code baseUse multisites to render content accordingly using one code baseBy doing this your site should be simultaneously available to both mobile and desktop browsers... Read More
Technical genius sought
January 16, 2007, by James Pearce
dotMobi is hiring! dotMobi is the first – and only – top-level internet domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices and making the mobile web a success. We are a well-funded start-up, backed by 12 well-known industry investors. We are seeking smart, smart software people to join us in Dublin and help us with a number of high-visibility projects that we believe can become fundamental in promoting the growth of the mobile web... Read More
