<>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(a)austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/