XML Reference Guide

Mar 14, 2003

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Depending in your target audience, you may have options for cell phone development other than WML. Most modern cell phones have some support for XHTML Mobile Profile, or XHTML-MP, though their support for features such as CSS and specifically color and graphics will naturally be determined in part by the capabilities of the actual phone. (I, for example, still use a Motorola i205, which has a tiny little screen and no color. So while it uses the Openwave browser we've been seeing in the simulator, advanced pages won't appear the same way on my phone.)

That said, let's take a look at what XHTML-MP actually is and how to put it to use.

One thing I haven't talked about here in the guide (yet) is the notion of XHTML Modularization. One of the good things brought on by the so-called "browser wars" of the 1990's was the understanding that not all browsers -- and browser-like applications -- are created equal, and that there needed to be a "standard" way of figuring out just what capabilities were available in which browsers. I'm not going to go into a full discussion of XHTML Modularization here, but I will tell you that there is a particular "flavor" of XHTML, XHTML-Basic, which is intended to provide a simple set of elements to provide the most basic capabilities typical browser should need.

XHTML-MP takes the tags defined by XHTML-Basic, adds a few more, and calls it a day. Let's look at what's actually supported:

Module	Elements
Structure	`body`, `head`, `html`, `title`
Text	`dfn`, `div`, `em`, `h1`, `h2`, `h3`, `h4`, `h5`, `h6`, `kbd`, `p`, `pre`, `q`, `samp`, `span`, `strong`, `var`
Hypertext	`a`
List	`dl`, `dt`, `dd`, `ol`, `ul`, `li`
Basic forms	`form`, `input`, `label`, `select`, `option`, `textarea`
Basic tables	`caption`, `table`, `td`, `th`, `tr`
Image	`img`
Object	`object`, `param`
Meta information	`meta`
Link	`link`
Base	`base`
Additional elements/attributes not included in XHTML Basic:
Forms	`fieldset`, `optgroup`
Legacy	`start` attribute on `ol`, `value` attribute on `li`
Presentation	`b`, `big`, `hr`, `i`, `small`
Style sheet	`style` element
Style attribute	`style` attribute

All of this means that the WML page we created in the previous section takes on a much more traditional look in XHTML-MP:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" 
                 "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

<head><title>Tutorial request</title></head>

<body>

<form action="http://www.nicholaschase.com/informit/tutorials.php" 
                                                    method="post">
      <p>My name is:</p>
      <input type="text" />
     
      <p>I'm interested in authoring in:</p>

      <select name="languagetype"> 
         <option value="WML">WML</option>
         <option value="XHTML-MP">XHTML-MP</option>
         <option value="XHTML-Basic">XHTML-Basic</option>

      </select>
      <input type="submit" value="Submit form" />
</form>


</body>

</html>

Notice the following about this page:

The DOCTYPE is specified as the WAP Forum version of XHTML-MP. There is a second version that is published by browser-maker Openwave that includes tags supported only by them, but for obvious reasons, we'll stick to the standard.
Unlike in the WML document, we actually need the form element.
The response to the form is not part of the document. This is an important point, because it points out a major difference between WML and XHTML-MP. In the former, you can have several "pages" with a single connection to the server. In XHTML-MP, each page is a new round-trip to the server. Cell phones don't have great bandwidth, so keep that in mind when designing your application.

Another point to notice about XHTML-MP versus WML is that XHTML-MP doesn't know anything about the actual phone itself. While we could look for the "accept" action in a WML deck, we can't do that with XHTML-MP. We can, however, take advantage of the accesskey attribute in XHTML to simulate some of the "phone-like" behavior we saw previously. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" 
                      "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

<head><title>Tutorial request</title></head>

<body>

  <p>I'm interested in authoring in:</p>
  <ol>
     <li><a href="wml.html" accesskey="1">WML</a></li>
     <li><a href="xhtmlmp.html" accesskey="2">XHTML-MP</a></li>

     <li><a href="xhtmlbasic.html" accesskey="3">XHTML-Basic</a></li>
  </ol>

</body>

</html>

As you can see in the image, the ordered list puts the numbers next to each item, and the accesskey tells the browser to follow the link when the user presses the appropriate key.

Another way that XHTML-MP is similar to "regular" XHTML is the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. You can do this either through the style attribute (to add style information to a particular element) or using the link element to add a style to the overall page, as in:

...
<head><title>Tutorial request</title>

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

</head>

<body>
...

Supported styles will vary by phone, of course, so be sure to stick with styles that are not crucial to the page; color as a decoration, but not an indication of required fields, for example. For more information on CSS, check out the CSS entry in this guide, or better yet, the Web Design Reference Guide.

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