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Adding An XHTML Mobile Site

 
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Looking for a book* recommendations to guide me in enabling a B2B web site for mobile browsers.

This probably is not much of a Java question, but I like this site; there are good folks here. So the "HTML and JavaScript" forum on JavaRanch is where I'll start. Hopefully this is the best place for this.

Just to set the stage.... there's this big site. Big, as in a lot of old jsp/servlet code with HTML and css that various folks have wrotten over a long span of time. That's my way of saying it's not a real tidy little setup. The users of the site are few, since it's for business to business. Nobody stumbles upon the site; it's invite only.

Then the business begins asking about making some of the site work on a bunch of different mobile devices. They don't want to spend too much (rules-out native apps so we're looking at making the site work on mobile browsers). So basically we've got to simplify the pages that will be mobile enabled, and limit the ability to get to other pages that will not be mobile enabled.

I figure I'm not the first one on this forum to have this kind of requirement. So, the question, has anyone found a book that guided them through the use of the usual tricks in style sheets, xhtml, etc to get this kind of effort done? I'm looking for something that can show various techniques and their advantages and disadvantages. I could just start putting a lot of "display: none" and see where that gets me, but I'm sure there are traps/gotchas that someone else has learned while "mobilizing" a web app like this. I'm less interested in a general xhtml book for mobile, and more interested in one that's got the perspective of not starting from scratch, but having an existing dynamic web site to get running.

--Dale--

(accidentally misspelled "written", above, and decided to leave the misspelling because it added to the substance of the sentence )

* Or classroom training!

 
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Mobile is not an easy thing because of all the different platforms and restrictions of the browsers.

DO NOT try to make an existing page mobile with different stylesheets. 99% of the time it is utter crap!

You might want to look at a library that does a lot of the dirty work for you on phone/browser inconsistency. http://jquerymobile.com/ is one example.

Eric
 
Dale Seng
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Thanks Eric!

Eric Pascarello wrote:Mobile is not an easy thing

Yup. And the reason why I'm looking for severe guidance.

Eric Pascarello wrote:DO NOT try to make an existing page mobile with different stylesheets.

Wasn't planning on it, unless someone wrote a book on how great it works, and it really did work. But you're not the first one that said it's not a good idea.

My searching on Amazon didn't give me anything very promising. I already have a jQuery book, but it would be cool to get a "how to mobilize your desktop web app" book.

--Dale--
 
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