Mobile Web
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The term "Mobile Web" refers to the use of the Web from mobile devices, such as mobile phones (cell phones), Personal Digital Assistants, and other such pocketable gadgets connected to a public network.
Mobile Web access has many advantages. With mobile web access, it is no longer necessary to remember to do something on the Web when getting back to a desktop computer. It can be done immediately, within the context that made one want to use the Web in the first place.
Moreover, with mobile devices, the Web can reach a much wider audience, and at all times in all situations. It has the opportunity to reach into places where wires cannot go, to places previously unthinkable (e.g. medical info to mountain rescue scenes) and to accompany everyone as easily as they carry the time in their wristwatches.
Finally, today, many more people have access to mobile devices than access to a desktop computer. This is likely to be very significant in developing countries, where web-capable mobile devices may play a similar role for deploying wide-spread Web access as the mobile phone has played for providing "plain old telephone service".
However, Mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. This is partly due to the small physical size of the screens of mobile devices and partly to and secondly because of their incompatibility with computer operating systems and the format of much of the information available on the Internet.
Development
The [W3C Mobile Web Initiative] is a new initiative set up by the W3C to develop best practices and technologies relevant to the Mobile Web. The goal of the initiative is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality. The main aim is to evolve standards of data formats from Internet providers that are tailored to the specifications of particular mobile devices. The W3C has published guidelines ([Best Practices]) for mobile content, and is actively addressing the problem of device diversity by establishing a technology to support a repository of [Device Descriptions].
New tools such as Macromedia's Flash Lite enable the production of user interfaces customized for mobile devices. In any case, with the increasing movement away from website-based content towards delivery via RSS, Atom and other formats in which content is divorces from presentation, the issue of microcontent becomes less of a problem as the device rather than the content-provider is enabled to specify how the content is displayed.
An alternative approach involves transforming the relationship between mobile devices and the Web are producing some interesting results. A variety of systems are being developed that combine mobile devices with USB flash drives and portable web servers. One example is indi, a software package that runs a 'personal web server' and web site based on Ruby and can be downloaded onto a flash drive. When the USB drive is connected to a computer, it runs its own operating environment rather than relying on that of the computer, meaning that it is compatible with Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows computers. A similar service is provided by WOS, or 'webserver on stick' a USB drive that transforms any computer into an Apache webserver with PHP and MySQL.
Mobile Web 2.0
Since the explosion of Web 2.0 applications over the last few years, some have been discussing how this technology can be applied to mobile devices. Probably the first technology to cross over onto mobile devices was the blog, resulting in the term moblog. Ajit Jaokar’s [Open Gardens] blog, takes this further, suggesting adapted versions of del.icio.us and flickr for mobile devices. The usage of mobile devices can potentially affect tagging and sharing data. For example, tags for a visual image could be added at the point when the image is captured, based on physical location, time, and data from other users. Sharing data between mobile devices, for example using Bluetooth, would also depend on physical location: in fact data could be fixed to particular locations, a practice known as ‘air graffiti’ or ‘splash messaging’ and enabled by a combination of spatial information and mapping feeds. Other suggestions, including one for a 'pocket wiki' for syncing wikis written with mobile devices have also been put forward by the blog [Web 2.5]. While critics point to the difficulties of transferring Web 2.0 concepts such as open standards to the mobile web, advocates present it as a means of bringing information down to the user rather than pushing information up onto the web.
Faxing via Mobile Web
With the advancement of internet faxing, faxes are being sent online. Furthermore, they can be sent and received through Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
References
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C)[W3C Mobile Web Initative (MWI)]
Ajit Jaokar. [Mobile web 2.0: Web 2.0 and its impact on mobility and digital convergence]. December 25 2005.
First Author. [Mobilizing Scholars: using mobile devices in scientific research]. May 2006.
This article was originally created and edited using the Web on mobile devices.
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