MOBILE WEB:Mobile browsing is rising in popularity, and Microsoft has been optimising sites to suit the multitude of devices available
MICHAEL DELL picked up his mobile phone and pointed to its screen. The scene was a press conference several years ago at Dell Computer's plant in Limerick, and someone had just asked him a question about the mobile web. "Who wants to browse the web on a screen that small?" he asked.
Many agreed with him at the time. But with the advent of more powerful, faster hand-held devices and phones, larger screen sizes, 3G broadband and lower data prices, browsing the mobile web has become more popular.
The huge increase in popularity of the mobile web also comes down to its appearance. Nowadays, most websites are optimised so their content can be viewed on any phone. They fit the device's screen parameters and are easy to read. One of the chief architects of this optimisation is tech giant Microsoft.
According to Dan Stevenson, Microsoft product unit manager at the company's European Development Centre, one of the fundamental issues with the mobile internet is the existence of thousands of different mobile phones, each with its own set of capabilities.
"So the challenge for a website developer, whether or not they work for Microsoft or a third party, is they can't make 10 different versions of their site, and they don't want to make one that looks good on one site and poor on another," said Stevenson.
With that in mind, Microsoft came up with a two-part solution. Built into the company's ASP.net technology is a mechanism for dynamically formatting web pages based on certain values. For example, you can specify an image format or the width of a table and how the page is formatted, based on certain values.
Secondly, a database and set of tools was developed in Ireland at the European Development Centre for managing abilities of hundreds of thousands of different devices and their browsers. "When you combine that with the tech on ASP.net, I can write a web page that will dynamically format the page based on the capabilities of the given browser or phone," said Stevenson. "For example, I can have a list of messages in my inbox and I can guarantee that the list will not be more than two screens tall. Another example would be advertising - the software will ensure the dimensions of the ad appear correctly on the screen for each different type of phone, so the advertisement doesn't become postage-stamp size."
The science bit is quite straightforward. Developers write one version of the page, put in numerous programmatic calls to determine and fetch the capabilities of users' phones, and optimises the site for each browser. What Microsoft did not realise at the time was that there was a chance to provide this capability database and functionality externally for any developer building on the Microsoft platform.
The company did, however, eventually see this chance to push the software out to the developer community. "We announced at the MIX09 conference in March the public availability of what we called the mobile device browser file, which is an XML file containing all of these devices and browser capabilities, and it's integrated into the ASP.net web development platform so that anyone building a website can use this file to automatically optimise their site for any kind of phone and they only have to build one version of the site."
So why did Microsoft get so involved in pushing out a product that can help all developers within and outside the company?
According to Stevenson, the rationale was twofold. The company wanted to help developers get through some of the confusion of building a site for the mobile web. "We wanted to make their lives easier in terms of providing 'one size fits all' websites, except it's not really one size - it's dynamically optimised websites that make it easier for developers to build-up mobile sites and services. The second thing was we wanted to make it easier for them using Microsoft's ASP.net framework."
Work on the mobile web continues at the European Development Centre. Stevenson says the facility is working on a "bunch of projects". The company will continue to add to the capability database and engage with the developer community to make it easier for them to target different mobile devices, he adds.
"Internally, my group has just released the latest version of Hotmail for mobile phones and is working on a new version right now. We're also updating Microsoft's mobile services. The company is really making a big investment in the mobile space."
