Overview

This Solutions Article discusses the ways device-independent content can change the way you do business and how an intelligent XML server streamlines the process of formatting content for emerging wireless devices.

The Web Browser:  The Constant That Isn't

Since the introduction of the World Wide Web, the only real constant has been the browser. Even the much-hyped "browser battles" haven't really changed the landscape all that much. Browsers still primarily present text, pictures, and hyperlinks to users at PCs or terminals.

As scripting, multimedia, and other enhancements have made the browsing experience richer, it has also -- for better or worse -- made design more device-dependent. Designers lay out Web sites for specific browsers, specific screen resolutions and color depths, specific bandwidth, and even specific operating systems, all based on the idea that the bulk of users have browsers that support these requirements. The hope is that anyone whose system is different can work around the limitations imposed by the designers. And that has usually been true enough, causing only minor irritation to users whose browsers work outside the "standard expectations." Until now.

Wireless Changes Everything

The standard expectations for Web browsers are finally changing, primarily because of the tremendous market potential of the wireless Web. Convenience is paramount to wireless Web users, but display, input, and bandwidth are currently several steps backward from the desktop model. How do you design for a specific screen resolution when there may not even be a screen? How patient are users with splash screens and light-hearted introductory text when they have a 9600-baud connection in their phone? If they have to fill out a long form to access a site, will that discourage the user who has to hand-write each symbol with a stylus or, worse, key in every symbol on a 12-key telephone keypad?

Wireless devices like phones, PDAs, pagers, and headsets are arguably in their technological infancy, but their adoption rate is staggering. Many businesses are rethinking their Web presence to take advantage of this market.

But does this mean the end of design? Quite the opposite. This fertile new market will be won by the smartest and most convenient design.

So what do you do with 10 or ten thousand pages of content you've already designed for yesterday's "standard" browser capabilities, and how do you develop today's content? There are two main approaches.

The Wrong Approach: "Scrape and Squish"

It is tempting to ignore the new requirements, and many Web services are happy to help you do that. They present your Web content -- without any modifications from your side -- to wireless users through "scrape and squish" filters. Essentially, these filters load the pages from your site onto the filter site's server, then delete most graphics and make every page into a long string of text and links before sending it over the air to the wireless device.

If your content were simple text, this approach would work fine. But it's not. It's tables, graphics, lines, and text, if not more. It's also branding and positioning. "Scrape and squish" essentially ignores the needs of a wireless user, and it shows.

Should you expect more from a 4-line display? Yes, actually. This site would be much more effectively rendered on a small 4-line display like this:

 And you wouldn't even have to change the source file.

The Right Approach: Device-independent Content, Device-specific Design

The same considerations that go into designing for a graphical browser should go into designing for other types of browsers or microbrowsers.

• Marketing message
• Usability
• Attractive presentation

Obviously, the same design can't work well for all media, but that doesn't mean you have to create different Web sites for each medium. The key is separating design from content.

The Ingeniux CMS content store serves virtually unlimited purposes, because the content is completely independent from presentation. For example, a simple page might include the following information:

• The company logo
• A slogan or promotional message
• A navigation bar
• A feature story or catalog entry
• Links to three news stories
• Advertisements
• Copyright information

Each element can include more information. For example, each news story link could have a headline, an abstract, and a graphic.

In this model, content developers make the content as rich as possible with little or no regard for presentation. They don't control the fonts, the colors, the line widths, or any other formatting concerns. This has the incidental benefit of decreasing time-to-Web, since studies have shown content developers consistently spend 50% or more of their time on formatting.

Presentation is based on XSL stylesheets (templates), which can be different for every type of browser. You might have multiple stylesheets for a browser, for example one for a news page, one for the home page, and one for a catalog listing, or one stylesheet that incorporates all functions.

Presenting this example content to two very different browsers (a graphical browser and a WAP microbrowser in this example) means making several formatting decisions.

The separate content and presentation model is also the key to future-proofing your content. When new Web-capable devices are introduced, you can accommodate them by adding new device-specific stylesheets.

But creating stylesheets isn't the end of the story. You could compile different static sites based on the stylesheets, but that would be obviously very frustrating for customers -- you couldn't very well require your customers to go to different URLs based on their browser types. So after the designer has created a stylesheet for each device, the presentation is turned over to a server for the actual assembly.

The Role of Device-aware XML Servers

There are over 200 types of Web clients in common use, including browsers, microbrowsers, robots/crawlers, and B2B applications. That doesn't mean you need 200 stylesheets, though you certainly could have that many. As each client requests content from your Web server, it also identifies itself. For example, a Windows 98 PC running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 identifies itself with a string like this:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

Standard Web servers more or less ignore this identification, simply serving up the existing HTML or XML content to the client. The Ingeniux CMS Deployment Server, however, is able to match the client's identification with a pre-defined set of capabilities and respond dynamically with appropriately formatted content.

In today's environment, most clients still get a standard XML or HTML graphical presentation, but popular wireless clients like WAP, HDML, or i-mode devices receive content formatted with device-specific XSL stylesheets.

Scalability is More Important than Ever

Client-aware servers must not only be able to use stylesheets appropriate to each device, they must also be able to scale to work with new technologies on both the server and client sides. Monolithic content management systems can be blind sided by popular new technologies, trapping a company in yesterday's technology until they release new versions of their systems. An example that stretches across both content structure and delivery is NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service.

DoCoMo, like other popular wireless companies, is trying to position their technology as the worldwide standard, a position no technology can currently claim. i-mode's penetration in Japan's lucrative wireless communications market (more than 50% by most estimates) makes it a strong contender for the as yet elusive worldwide crown. Wireless users are not particularly brand-loyal and they replace their devices every 12-24 months, so almost any company's foothold in a particular regional market is up for grabs. So what if a hot technology like i-mode shows up with a giant marketing push in your region? How will you be able to respond to the new demands on your content? With the Ingeniux CMS, you can quickly add the presentation and communications technology extensions.

The idea that "wireless changes everything" may seem a little restrictive, but it's true. Even though wireless devices enjoy very rapid adoption and technological advancement, they're certainly not the only alternative to PC- or workstation-based Web browsers. But what wireless has done is force consumers and content providers like you to think about Web browsing in new ways. This new thinking extends to other not-necessarily-wireless devices like television set-top boxes, connected appliances, and desktop aids for the handicapped. All of those devices put new demands on your content and server, and the Ingeniux CMS Server is designed around this new way of thinking about the Internet user and content provider experiences. Since you can't predict what tomorrow's demands will be, you can't allow yourself to get shackled with a delivery system that won't adapt to those demands.

Conclusion

The wireless Web presents new challenges for presentation and delivery, but with Ingeniux CMS, you can use a single, well-designed content store to present to any number of devices. Still, with the market changing so rapidly, you can't afford to settle for a server that's not extensible enough to adapt to the next technology shift.

To Learn More
To learn more about Ingeniux CMS please email info@ingeniux.com or call our Solutions Group at 206-788-4305.