Before
Now
What has changed
- new output devices: Small screens, Speech synthesizers, Braille devices
- new input devices: Electronic pens (handwriting), Speech recognition, Gestures
- new environments: low bandwith networks, GPS, ambient noise, batteries
- Web pages are becoming Web applications
What consequences for the Web?
It creates a new world of problems!
What to do?
Part I 1/2: what not to do.
- Rebuild from scratch: WAP (failed)
- Rewrite dedicated sites: "click here for PDA version" (not scalable)
- Write dedicated portals (not scalable)
- Fragment the Web:
.mobi
(avoid!)
Part II: what to do.
Three ways of dealing with the problem:
- 1. Educate webmasters to write accessible content.
- 2. Write "smart" browsers.
- 3. Adapt existing content to new devices, or write better browsers
- 4. Design new languages to make Web content multimodal aware
I.1. accessible content
Use W3C specs: XHTML, XHTML2, WCAG
split content and presentation
think accessible
...but not enough...
I.2. smart browsers
e.g. Opera, Minimo, Blazer, etc.
I.3. adapted content
Have several versions of a site, served on demand
I.3. adapted content (contd.)
Or build content on the fly