Development Pitfalls
Many problems arise when content written in XHTML is shown on different devices. For example, some devices will honor colors specified in CSS, while other devices will not. Building an adaptive application means delivering different content to different devices, according to their capabilities. This can bring huge complexity, given the number of different devices in the market with different hardware (screen-sizes, coloring capacity, buttons, memory and speed) and browsers. Software updates on mobile browsers are much more difficult than with desktop browsers, and as a result broken software tends to stay in use until the device is discarded.
Many software initiatives attempt to solve this problem. Most of these initiatives provide a proprietary language to write WAP content, which will render different content (XHTML-MP, WML, CHTML, etc.) according to the requesting device. One commercial initiative is WURFL, which uses a hierarchical XML configuration file mapping hundreds of device capabilities. WURFL also offers a "Wireless Abstraction Layer", called WALL, which specifies special tags that are automatically converted into a markup language supported by the device. The W3C DDWG has created a specification to standardize access to repositories of device capability information, to be part of a common framework for content adaptation technologies.
Read more about this topic: XHTML Mobile Profile
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