[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia for Cell Phones

Fri Jul 16 17:16:04 UTC 2004

> <>One critical difference for WAP phone browsing is that many phones 
> have extremely small page size limits; a maximum of 1397 bytes.of 
> compressed content per page in order to work with currently fielded 
> devices. So Wikipedia pages will need to be chopped up into right-size 
> chunks, and an effective navigation interface provided to move through 
> these. Fortunately we already have hierarchical subheadings and 
> paragraph breaks, so these can be used to "paginate" the WAP data 
> cleanly, rather than breaking it on arbitary boundaries.

The issue is rendered moot by the fact that WAP is effectively dead.
XHTML and CSS have supplanted it, offering easier (and more widespread)
implementation with very little additional overhead.  (In fact, I don't
remember seeing a WAP browser that wasn't on a five-year-old,
four-line-display Nokia.)

Wikipedia's XHTML source is hardly ideal, but it works.  The lightweight
skins make it perfectly suitable for the kind of dynamic interaction we
would ask from it with WAP, and for a more tailored interface there's
always TomeRaider.

> -- Neil

-- 
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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