Andrea Trasatti recently wrote:
“Transcoding is a hot topic these days in the mobile community…”
..but I’m urged to clarify that content transcoding (targeting right markup language), or transformation/adaption (reorganizing content and selecting right assets such as images depending on device characteristics) have been a hot topic since the early days!
While things have been getting much better with respect to target markup languages, with Basic XHTML (MP) (with or without CSS) becoming the standard (viva web standards), the problem of differences with respect to handset characteristics (screen sizes, supported “types”, locale, other) will remain for a while; actually for a long time, forever… Remember the days of HDML and cHTML and WML 1.x?
Today the topic of transformation has been gaining strength, pointing to the fact that the mobile web is growing in usage/importance. Interestingly is that still there is no single solution to this problem of generic transformation/adaptation. The solution is called 1) mobile-specific websites (right, Jason? :-)), or 2) client-side adaptation (similar to iPhone).
ceo