It is today's news that Apple seems to have sold over one million iPhones within this last weekend.[1] Web for mobiles (and pocket-size devices in general) is every day closer or, at least, not too far.
According to many people I heard and read from, the vast majority of web-enabled mobile phones and PDA provide, as of today, poor support to existing "standard" sites. Instead, there are some browsers like Opera Mini http://www.operamini.com/demo/ or some devices like Apple iPhone http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/ which perform astonishingly well. Even so, the default www.pmwiki.org home page appears quite inadequate as you test it in Opera Mini http://www.operamini.com/demo/ (please have a try!) and here is why I wonder whether we can do better. I suggest that we: - Add a "mobile" command next to the "print" one. I do not see any reason why we should have a customized "experience" for printing devices and should not, instead, for mobile devices. Conceptually, it is just the same. As a matter of fact the [[{*$Name}?action=mobile|mobile]] link could then be "echoed"/copied manually to any other part of the site at will. - Provide a %nomobile% (and/or >>nomobile<<) markup in order to exclude certain parts of the page which we deem not appropriate for mobiles. As an example, in the pmwiki.org homepage the advertising inside the sidebar could be marked >>nomobile<< [[#ads]] (:ad adsense-1:) >><< thus excluding it from the mobile view. Such a way to tag parts of the page to be stripped off in a particular view is consistent with similar markup in the wiki, like (:if action browse:)(:ifend:) and others. Now, attempting to provide a proof of concept to the community, I made a copy of the /print/ folder within the pmwiki skin[2], named it /mobile/ and changed every occurrence of the "print" string with "mobile" (observing the right case, also) anywhere. I hoped to have an ?action=mobile available to start testing, but I failed miserably; perhaps the engine is more complicated than I can handle. Nevertheless, I feel that this road could easily lead to some positive, working results. And, most probably, with not much effort at all (if one knows how the system works). Once enabled, it should be rather trivial to obtain results similar to this working example[3] http://www.kirpi.it/176/index.xhtml (to be seen in a narrowed browser window. Does anybody know how to (correctly) enable an ?action=mobile command which invokes a /mobile/ skin the same way ?action=print does, please? Luigi ---- [1] http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&hl=en&ned=us&q=iphone+weekend+million [2] For obvious reasons, one of which is that any development should be done at the standard level, the skin of choice is the "pmwiki" one, I guess. [3] This example is provided as a template to study and start from by the .mobi domain site. _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list pmwiki-users@pmichaud.com http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users