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I had few doubts about device specific style sheets for presentation
of generic WML content.
What do we mean by using different style sheet for different phones ?
What are the guidelines for writing device specific style sheets ?
and how do they differ from each other at content level.

As far as I know I think WAP Devices differ in characteristic such as
1.. Screen Size
2.. Support for WML script
3.. Image displaying capabilities.
Are there any other device specific characteristics ?
If we are using these characteristic to write device specific style sheet
then we would be performing some kind of clipping on the original WML
content.


Since all phone follow WML specification, so why do we need to write
a separate style sheet for every phone.I agree that some of WAP phones
can not display images or have support for WMLScript.But apart from that
the micro browser do render WML content. The only difference is the way
they render WML content and the rendering is left unto the device.
 e.g.  <do> with type="accept"
can be displayed as a button or as a link.

Eventually if all support WMLScript and Images then there wont be
any need for writing different style sheets for every device.

Regards
Roofi.

Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 17:59:38 +0200
From: Daniel Hinz <daniel.hinz@higher-order.de>
Subject: Re: Dynamic conversion from XML to HTML & WML

> > >  I have written stylesheets for creating WML & HTML files statically
from XML using XT. WML files
> > >  can be directly displayed by microbrowser (Nokia Wap Toolkit) and
HTML files can be
> > >  displayed by any browser. Now, I am working on dynamic conversion of
HTML and WML from
> > >  XML depending upon the browser. I need to host only one XML page on
server and it can be
> > >  browsed by any browser or microbrowser.
> > >
> > >  I would like to know how you are doing and welcome your suggestions
in this regard.
> >
> > Evaluate the Browsername in the HTTP Request. Use the appropriate
> > Stylesheet for the given Browser and you're fine.
> >
> > Note, that in this way you can also optimize content presentation for
> > all the different WAP phones out there by using different Stylesheets
> > for different phones.
> >
> > The usal way to go is one Stylesheet per phone. It's even worse than one
> > Stylesheet for Netscape and Internet Explorer when using XHTML.
>
> Ugh - we had a brief talk about this at XMLDevCon2k in the XML.com
> discussion forum. Getting into the "one stylesheet per phone" is a
> horrible world of pain, there are already about 25 (probably lots more
> now) WAP browsers out there. We need to force the W3C to take WAP into
> consideration for standardisation, or the cost of WAP development is going
> to be astronomical, and we're not learning from mistakes of the past.
>
> And don't use one stylesheet for netscape, and one for IE, please. Its
> really not necessary. It takes a little longer to get things right, and it
> does require some compromise on features (although in reality, very little
> compromise), but its a definite win to only develop one stylesheet. Even
> JS can be done using a cross browser JS library.


I agree on the horrible world of pain. Unfortunately, due to the nature
of the problem, no other solution is possible. You see, each mobile
device has its very own philosphy of design and thats what prompted the
wapforum not to force vendors to implement the presentation layer in a
specific way (like in html). For instance, ie. select tags may be
rendered inline, but vendors do not need to to this, they could also pop
up, when you press a button.

Thus, you don't really need to have a different stylesheet for every
device. But if you want to make it look nice and easy to use, there is
no way around this. The vendors do offer help in the form of Design
Guidelines for their phones, which do help a lot.

Plus its not like you'd need to develop 25 different stylesheets. You
can use the import mechanism to override ie. the rendering of select
tags. It usually only boils down to Ericsson vs. Nokia Stylesheets (The
WAP Wars). But frankly i propably don't have the whole picture, i only
know the phones from Ericsson, Nokia and the new Siemens.


Regards,

Daniel Hinz

ps: Until WAP came out, i never had to reboot a telephone.

- --
Daniel Hinz - XML Evangelist and Software Developer
Higher-Order AG
Burchardstrasse 19, D-20095 Hamburg, Germany
fon: 040 / 325587 - 0  fax: 040 / 325587 - 99
mailto:daniel.hinz@higher-order.de http://www.higher-order.de


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