Multiple Device Support Using XML and XSLT
Introduction
By this point, I've written quite a few articles for InformIT on a wide variety of topics dealing with mobile and wireless application development. All of these dealt with one specific programming language, development tool, or hardware platforma nice approach when these topics are being introduced but not necessarily an accurate depiction of reality. In the real wireless world, no one device, protocol, or language is prevalent. Instead, we're faced with a smorgasbord of mobile laptops, PDAs, two-way pagers, and mobile phones. Without looking into the future, I can quickly name off several markup technologies that are in prevalent use today. These include HTML, XHTML, XML, WML, i-Mode's CHTML, HDML, Palm Query Application's Simple HTML, and AvantGo's own HTML subset. If nothing else, it's clear that the number of device markup languages is increasing, not decreasing, although much of the industry is hoping to standardize around XHTML. For now, the best hope that a developer has of supporting all of these different formats is using XML and XSLT to distribute data to devices.