Getting Started with Mobile Web Development
Part 1 introduces the mobile industry, mobile users, and the Mobile Web. You’ll meet web policymakers, authors of mobile best practices, and drafters of Mobile Web standards. You’ll learn to evaluate a standard or best practice and judge its appropriateness for your mobile web project.
With this knowledge of the ecosystem, you’ll prepare for a mobile web development project by setting up a development environment, selecting an IDE, and configuring a web server with common mobile MIME types. Then you’ll extend Firefox with add-ons for viewing mobile web pages on the desktop, using mobile emulators and actual mobile devices for more accurate views of the Mobile Web.
Once the development environment is ready, you’ll examine the markup and scripting languages that drive rich, lightweight web experiences on all kinds of mobile devices, especially smartphones. You’ll study HTML, XHTML-MP, and WML, then style mobile markup using CSS. Finally, you’ll review best practices for coding web pages for mobile devices.
The Syntax of the Mobile Web
Part 2 explores the markup, scripting languages, and device databases that enable device-aware mobile web development. You’ll learn about the markup languages that drive rich, lightweight web experiences on all kinds of mobile devices, especially smartphones. You’ll study HTML, XHTML-MP, and WML, style mobile markup using CSS, and get to know the best practices for coding web pages for mobile devices.
You’ll learn to use databases of mobile device characteristics to identify web traffic from mobile phones, and adapt markup to target mobile devices and mobile browser versions.
For capable mobile devices, you’ll iteratively enrich a mobile web site with client-side interactivity powered by ECMAScript-MP, JavaScript, and AJAX. You’ll also examine the differences in DOM structure between mobile browsers, and delve into strategies for cross-platform scripting in a mobile environment.
Advanced Mobile Web Development Techniques
Part 3 introduces advanced development techniques that improve Mobile Web usability and enhance the user experience on smartphone browsers.
Here you’ll see how to make the design and usability of your Mobile Web pages even better to help the mobile user easily and rapidly achieve goals. You’ll compare smartphone screen dimensions, examine sample page layouts, and learn about design and usability best practices.
Then you’ll investigate the advanced features of smartphone browsers. You’ll learn how to take advantage of these features by exploring XHTML and JavaScript techniques for enhancing the user experience of Mobile Web applications on a number of smartphone browsers, including the iPhone, Android, Palm webOS, BlackBerry, Nokia Series 60, Opera, and Windows Mobile.
Deploying into the Mobile Ecosystem
By now, your adaptive and standards-compliant Mobile Web site is running, but it may need tuning to ensure the best possible performance on the Mobile Web.
Part 4 provides real-world strategies to ensure the survival and adoption of your Mobile Web content.
You’ll learn to compress document size, reduce web server transactions, and coerce mobile browsers into caching your Mobile Web content.
You’ll validate mobile markup syntax, styles, and overall site readiness using three validation services from W3C and dotMobi.
You’ll test your Mobile Web site using mobile browser emulators as well as browsers on actual mobile devices.
You’ll deploy your Mobile Web content into the ecosystem and learn how to use a simple script to distinguish between desktop and mobile browser traffic, routing mobile browsers to your optimized Mobile Web site. You’ll acquire Mobile Web traffic through search engine submission, advertising, promotions, whitelisting, and mobile SEO.
You’ll defensively fortify your Mobile Web site to discourage transcoders from machineadapting markup that is already optimized for mobile devices. You’ll learn to identify when your Mobile Web site encounters traffic from transcoders, and adapt your pages for the device originating the request rather than the transcoder.
Finally, you’ll share your Mobile Web and phone expertise by contributing device capabilities, browser test results, and mobile development tips and tricks with the mobile development community.
Appendixes
Part 5 contains a range of reference material to give you a leg up on learning Mobile Web development. You’ll find user-agents, browser information, and HTTP request headers supplied for many types of mobile devices, especially smartphones. There’s a glossary to help you decipher mobile industry acronyms, technical terms, and jargon. And a case study takes you under the hood as it describes an experiment that uncovers the actual caching and concurrency behavior of mobile browsers.
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