Chapter 8. THE MOBILE WEB

"The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."

Vannevar Bush, Electrical Engineer and Science Administrator

THE MOBILE web is the extension of the stationary web to mobile phones, PDAs, and other mobile and handheld computing devices. The limitations of such devices in terms of screen size, computing power, bandwidth, energy capacity, and the lack of traditional input devices forces us to reassess and tailor the search and navigation technologies we have presented to face the new challenges posed. With the ubiquity of the mobile phone, it is inevitable that the mobile and stationary web will eventually become inseparable. Meanwhile, mobile devices such as phones provide additional impetus for developing technologies such as voice, touch screen, and pen input interfaces, and web services such as personalization and location awareness.

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

  • Introduce the mobile web as an extension of the (stationary) web, and the challenges that it entails in terms of user interaction.

  • Discuss markup language support for mobile devices.

  • Discuss the i-mode mobile service as a leader in the delivery of wireless internet services.

  • Present mobile commerce (m-commerce) as the mobile counterpart of e-commerce.

  • Present two case studies of mobile services: the delivery of personalized news and learning resources to mobile devices.

  • Discuss mobile web browsers, and the trend to support a media-rich mobile ...

Get An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.