Web to Mobile Content Adaptation

Technological advances in the capabilities and features of mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs has led to a huge growth in the amount of types of device that you can now surf the Web with. Some industry leaders refer to the Web that can be accessed from mobile devices as the Mobile Web.

The large number and variety of Web-enabled devices poses a number of challenges for Web site owners who want to offer access from mobile devices. The W3C Device Independence Working Group described many of the issues in its report Authoring Challenges for mobile Device Independence.

One approach to solving this challenge is based around the concept of Content Adaptation. instead of authors having to create specialized pages for each kind of device that might request them, content adaptation automatically transforms an author's material.

As an example, content might be converted from a device-independent markup language, such as XDIME, an implementation of the W3C's DIAL specification, into a form suitable for the device, such as XHTML Basic, C-HTML or WML. Similarly a suitable device-specific CSS style sheet or a set of in-line styles might be generated from abstract style definitions. Likewise a device specific layout might be generated from abstract layout definitions.

Once created, the device-specific materials form the response returned to the device from which the request was made.

Content adaptation requires a processor that performs the selection, modification and generation of materials to form the device-specific result. IBM's Websphere Everyplace Mobile Portal (WEMP), BEA Systems' WebLogic Mobility Server, Morfeo's MyMobileWeb and Apache Cocoon are examples of such processors.

Wurfl and WALL are popular Open Source tools for content adaptation. WURFL is an XML-based Device Description Repository with APIs to access the data in Java and PHP (and other popular programming languages). WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library) lets a developer author mobile pages that look like plain HTML, but converts them to WML, C-HTML and XHTML Mobile Profile depending on the capabilities of the device from which the HTTP request originates.

InfoGin developed an automatic Web to mobile content adaptation engine that offers users to surf the web using any mobile device with an automatic and real-time intelligent conversion engine for professional content-editing and marketing products, that enable full control over the delivered content. So far over 20 million mobile users across the globe are already using InfoGin’s Platform.