What You’ll Learn
This book is an advanced reference for the mobile web today, and it is the most complete
reference available at this time. This may seem an ambitious claim, but it is the truth.
This book draws upon a mix of experience and very detailed research and testing not
available in other books, websites, or research papers about the mobile web.
Programming the Mobile Web will teach you how to create effective and rich experiences
for mobile web browsers, and also how to create offline applications or widgets that
will be installed in the devices’ applications menu.
We will not talk only about the star devices, like the iPhone and Android devices; we
will also cover mass-market platforms from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Black-
Berry, Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian.
Chapter 1, The Mobile Jungle, and Chapter 2, Mobile Browsing, introduce the mobile
world: they will help you understand who is who in this market, what platforms you
should care about, how to know your users, and how mobile browsing works (covering
all the mobile browsers currently available in the market). We will also cover the history
of the mobile web, including WAP and Mobile Web 2.0.
Chapter 3, Architecture and Design, focuses on architecture, design, and usability, pre-
senting a quick review of the tips, differences, and best practices for defining the nav-
igation structure; the design template; and the differences for touch devices.
We will install our development and production environment in Chapter 4, Setting Up
Your Environment, which covers all the emulators, tools, and IDEs we will need to use
for our work and what is required on the server side.
Chapter 5, Markups and Standards, and Chapter 6, Coding Markup, focus on markup
coding; we will review every standard (mobile and not) that we can use, with a full
compatibility table presented for each one. We will cover what happens with standard
code (including links, images, frames, and tables) and how to deal with mobile-specific
markup, like call-to actions and viewport management for zooming purposes. Every
feature will be tested for almost every important browser today, so we know what we
can use on every platform. We will also cover how SVG and Adobe Flash work on the
mobile web.
In Chapter 7, CSS for Mobile Browsers, we will start our journey in CSS Mobile and
look at how to deal with standards and differences in attribute support. We will see
how CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 work on mobile browsers and what advanced extensions we
can use on some devices. Chapter 8, JavaScript Mobile, deals with JavaScript, starting
with how standard dialogs and pop-ups work and passing through DOM compatibility
and touch event support.
We will continue adding best practices for mobile web development in Chapter 9, Ajax,
RIA, and HTML 5, covering Rich Internet Application technologies including Ajax
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