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Depending on your target market, you are likely to encounter hundreds of different device makes and models accessing your mobile site. Even in when considering that in many countries, the average handset replacement time is under a year, this still represents well over a hundred current devices in most developed countries.
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The mobile device is the user's physical interface with your mobile site and individual handsets can vary widely in their capabilities, processing power, and method of interfacing with the end user.
When developing traditional desktop websites, it is expected that your users will access your site using a range of different browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions. Your site developers need to take into account each of these factors and test to ensure that the site works on the most popular combinations. However, when developing sites for access by mobile devices, the number of factors that must be taken into account are much greater.
Instead of two or three dominant browsers as on the desktop, there are well over 10 different browsers in common use on today's mobile devices. Instead of two or three desktop operating systems to take into account, there are eight or nine common amongst mobile handsets. Additionally, factors such as screen size, markup language, image formats and even user input and control methods need to be taken into account when rendering a page for a particular device.
The challenge to ensure that your mobile site is accessible by the mainstream of devices is much greater than that of ensuring that your desktop website is accessible and tested. nexsites greatly simplifies this task by its process of device identification and automatic content adaptation. nexsites maintains an active database of over 4,000 mobile devices and automatically detects the type of device being used each time your site is accessed. The content is adapted on-the-fly to best suit the device's capabilities.
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Some of the device specific adaptations that are automatically performed by nexsites are:
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Image Scaling
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| Images are automatically scaled down to fit the resolution of the device, while maintaining the intended size ratio of the content. nexsites uses the intended width specified by the content designer, maps this width to the screen size of the target device and scales the image accordingly. Scaling is performed using image re-sampling algorithms helping to ensure that the quality of the image is maintained during the scaling.nexsites will never scale up an image; if the original image is smaller than expected for the current device, then it is served at its original size. |
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| Format Conversion |
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The format of the source image is automatically detected and checked against the list of image formats supported by the device. If the source image's format is not supported on the handset, the image is converted to the most optimal format that the handset supports. This conversion is designed to be as loss-less as possible. Frequently, a smaller download size can be achieved by converting the image to a more optimal format, and this is also taken into account automatically by nexsites when determining the optimal output format.
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| Down-sampling |
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The number of colours in the image is compared against the number of simultaneous colours displayable by the device (known as "colour depth"). If required, nexsites will down-sample an image to remove enough colours to ensure that the image can be displayed on the target device. This typically involves dithering removed colours to smooth them into existing colours by using near-match pixels. During the down-sampling process, the total image byte size is also checked, and if necessary the image quality is reduced to provide a smaller size image to the handset to reduce load on the handset's processor and to limit data transfer costs.
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| Markup Language |
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The language that the device's mobile browser expects in order to render the page is referred to as the device's supported "markup language". The three mobile markup forms that have become popular are HTML, XHTML-MP and i-HTML, and nexsites automatically determines which is most suitable for each device. However, choosing the markup language is not enough; many individual devices have restrictions, peculiarities or even bugs in their markup language rendering, and nexsites adapts the output generated to work around these issues to produce the most consistent and native output in each device.
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| Emoticon Formats |
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Emoticons (also known as Picture Characters or in Japan as "e-Moji") are popular amongst mobile websites, especially in Asian markets to represent common everyday concepts, emotions or tasks. Japan's NTT DoCoMo popularized a common set of 250 icons vie their i-mode® Platform .Some handsets support these icons in its on-board software, and others support a subset or none at all. nexsites detects the level of emoticon support in each handset, and adapts the content to serve such icons in the most efficient way possible; using the image in the handset software where present, and downloading emulated icons when not.
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Almost all handsets have some form of numeric keypad and navigation joystick, but some handsets may also have touch-screens, QWERTY keyboards, scroll wheels or other pointing or data entry devices.
Your site needs to be usable with all these input methods. For example, a site with a large number of links or clickable areas on a single page may work well with a touch-screen, stylus based device, but will be very cumbersome to navigate with a device equipped only with a joystick or directional keypad, where each link needs to be navigated over with a click of the keypad, requiring many clicks to reach the desired link.
Another important factor to consider are the fonts made available by the handset. An average mobile user is not going to license, download and install fonts to their handset to use your mobile site, so you will need to ensure that your site can be displayed with the fonts packaged on the device. Most devices are delivered with only a single font, with character coverage for the major languages of the country in which the device was sold. Don't expect a device sold in Europe to be able to enter Chinese characters. Likewise, don't expect a device sold in Asia to be able to enter Greek.
Finally, the handset capacity plays an important role in the way your mobile web site will appear. Many handsets have a hard limit on the number of bytes that can be served in a single mobile web page, in order to conserve the limited mobile CPU capacity of the device, or to avoid surprising the user with expensive data traffic charges. This handset-specific maximum page size must be respected by each mobile web page accessed by the device.
nexsites handles all these factors transparently; factors that would otherwise require a significant amount of device-specific testing to uncover and development to accommodate. |
