Characteristics of wireless devices
cumbersome data input capabilities
different markup languages: WML, c-HTML, HTML
Notes:
- Wireless devices come in different forms and shapes. Usually they are associated with cell phones, but Palm devices with wireless modems are also a popular choice. Most of the cell phones have limited screen display usually ranging from 2 rows by 12 characters and going up to 5 by 16. On Palms, you can get many more rows and characters per row.
- Entering data on cell phones is difficult because of small keypad and way of entering letters. Avoid designing applications which require the user to enter data, like credit card numbers, login information etc.
- Most of the WAP cell phones can only receive compiled pages up to 1492 bytes. Larger pages will result in errors displayed on the user’s browser. Thus application designers should split large pages in multiple smaller pages, that can be handled by the device.
- Different types of devices can use different markup languages. Currently WML and c-HTML are the most common ones. However, even if WML is a standard, developers should be aware of specific extensions implemented by various vendors. These extensions are usually not portable, but they may help the developer build a nicer application.