Cabinet Office
In the past few years a number of other methods have been made available to users to view information on websites. Different devices, both mobile and static in nature, are beginning to transform the Internet.
Information can be accessed from home via a computer or games console. The same data can be retrieved on the move using mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
In an ideal world, one website could be multi-purposed to allow all of these channels to see the same thing, but unfortunately, this may not always be possible.
This section is aimed at familiarising the web manager with the available media and how best to deal with them. See section 5.2 Your website on television.
Use each checklist to ensure that your web pages comply with these guidelines.
5.2 Your website on television
5.3.1 Checklist and summary
Checklist
Summary
Web managers should be aware that many of these new browsing modes would cause severe disruption to the end-view of their websites.
Games consoles and browsers on PDAs allow only a small viewable area at any one time and users can find it difficult to scroll up and down.
WAP is a completely different protocol and will not interact with a standard HTML website.
If all these browser modes were to be supported, it would not be unrealistic to suggest that a number of versions of a website will have to be maintained. Content Management Systems and multisource DTDs, XSL-T and XML may well be the saving grace in this field, but much of the technology is quite new and untested by public sector organisations.
5.3.2 Range of browsing devices
The world is now a very different place to that of seven years ago. Then, the web was new and all browsing of websites was based on a relatively small monitor, connected to a relatively large computer.
Now users can access an organisation’s website on a wide range of browsing devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones. These all have very different ways of interpreting and rendering data within very different screen sizes.
Three basic questions that a content provider is faced with today are:
The following sections cover some of the more common ways in which data will be accessed and also what Web managers can do to ensure that their information is displayed correctly on them.
5.3.3 Mobile access
5.3.3.1 Personal digital assistants (PDAs)
This is really a generic name given to small computing devices that offer more facilities than a mobile phone. Many different varieties are available on the market.
Some run very simple operating systems which are designed to allow the user to store memos, read and write emails, keep phone details and have calculator functions. The Palm Pilot and current Psion ranges are good examples of this type of product. The new versions of the Psion range now contain the Opera web browser application.
The other more versatile, and therefore more expensive, option is the miniature PC which runs the Microsoft CE operating system. These machines have very few differences to the average desktop PC. They have lower levels of RAM and smaller hard disks but run many of the common software programs used by Microsoft operating systems. They have versions of Microsoft Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer as well as many others and can therefore handle CSS, cookies, etc.
When hooked up to a modem these pocket PCs can browse the web as well as any other PC. They have a smaller viewable area and limited capabilities to run plug-ins, but other than that they are very good at what they do.
There are no special considerations for these machines as they either have no online capabilities, they use a CE version of the Microsoft Internet Explore, which deals with data in the same way as any other browser, or they use the WAP communication protocol. This is covered in the next section.
Information on best practice issues with PDAs
5.3.3.2 Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
Newspapers and television are now starting to carry adverts for the new WAP-enabled mobile phones. The companies' promises are a little exaggerated, and the ability to surf the web effectively on the phone is still some way off.
The WAP application strategy involves taking existing services that are at present supplied through a fixed-line environment and tailoring them to be user friendly and useful in a mobile wireless environment.
The WAP specifications define a set of protocols for applications, transactions, security and transport. They also define a Wireless Application Environment (WAE), which enables operators and manufacturers to develop applications such as microbrowsers, email and web-to-mobile messaging facilities.
If a device is said to be WAP capable it means that it has a microbrowser loaded into it which allows it to communicate, understand and handle all entities specified in the WML 1.1 DTD.
Many of the protocols are based around existing Internet standards such as HTTP but have been optimised for the unique constraints of the wireless environment, such as low bandwidth and connection instability.
Although this is a collection of new standards, these are all based on the use of XML. Every document and all output are in XML. In fact, there is very little within WAP that is new. The diagram below illustrates how a mobile device requests and receives data using this service.
A ‘GET’ request from a user is transmitted as a URL from the mobile phone to a WAP gateway, from where it is sent via standard HTTP to the Internet content provider. The request is handled by the server, which then transmits the requested data back across the same network.
Standard XHTML data could not be sent to mobile phones because of the size and complexity of content in the pages, the requirement to continually link to other pages within the server and the small screen size of the device. So another mark up language was needed to serve this environment.
WAP documents are written in Wireless Mark up Language (WML), which is a subset of XML. A WML document is known as a deck, and a single interaction by a user agent (ie the microbrowser) is called a card. A deck may consist of several cards. This simple architecture means that WAP sessions can cope with intermittent coverage and loss of server connection by downloading multiple screens to the client in one transaction.
The reduced processing power of the mobile devices concerned has the result that decks cannot contain too much information. This limitation means that multiple cards will have to be split into multiple decks to complete a complicated transaction.
Below is a link to a very simple example of a WML deck as defined by everything contained within the
The user can navigate from the front page (card 1), by either selecting the email address or phone number option. The secondary screens (defined by card 2 and card 3) give simple information and a link back to the first screen (card 1 again).
This example has only a limited amount of client interaction as there are only three cards in the deck and the only navigation is backwards and forwards.
As well as this basic display there are many features which allow client transactions to be completed. Variables within WML provide a mechanism for carrying selected data from one card to another. WMLScript, a slimmed-down version JavaScript, can deal with more complex elements.
It is obvious from this section that a standard HTML website will not deliver data across this medium. Further information on the structuring of documents, server architecture and delivery protocols can be seen at the following website.
5.3.4 Games consoles
Of the games consoles available at the time of writing, Sega Dreamcast, Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox offer web browsing facilities to the user at home. For example, with the Sega Dreamcast the browser it uses is called DreamKey, which is based on a quite early version of the Netscape browser. Because of the browser’s limitations there are some very specific requirements in presenting information on this system.
It should be remembered that this is a games console and is not primarily designed for browsing the web. This limitation is very obvious when trying to use the scrolling and selecting mechanisms. There is no mouse for the unit: the user can either use the joystick control or the extra keyboard. Neither is particularly good and takes some time to master.
As the system is based on an early version of Netscape it does not have the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets. All fonts and colours are subsequently rendered in a flat format. This does not inhibit the use of most pages, but they do lose a degree of presentational style.
Images rendered by the browser are relatively good, but any images that contain small text can be very difficult to read. This can be overcome by using the zoom facility.
Below there are 2 screenshots of a template site accessed through this games system compared to the same website on a standard web browser. Although the rendering quality of the Dreamcast is quite obviously lower, the website is still usable.
Screen rendering
30 pixels of the screen are given over to a Dreamcast status bar at the bottom of each page. Three screen resolutions are offered to users:
Small: 607 x 453 (default setting)
Medium: 640 x 480
Large: 768 x 576 (equates to a standard SVGA monitor resolution)
This limited screen rendering capability usually results in a user having to scroll left and right as well as up and down to get the full information from the screen.
Text
The Dreamcast also suffers from the same limitations that the digital television systems do. All text should be large to ensure that it is rendered correctly on the lower-specification viewing screen. Text size is controlled by the system and can be set to one of two levels, small or large.
Colours
The colour palette available on a television is not as rich as that on a full-colour PC so images should be designed carefully. This is especially important when text is used within the graphic. The system does support all standard graphic formats such as GIF, JPEG and PNG.
Client-side imagemaps
Imagemaps are supported and work well. As mentioned earlier, the usability of these maps depends on the text size within the given image.
Frames
Frames are supported but may not render as well as expected particularly if groups of nested frames are used.
Version of HTML
Dreamcast will only support the use of HTML 3.2. This is not a problem for any website using the HTML 4 standard, as the browser will simply ignore what it does not understand. HTML 3.2 does not support many of the WAI recommendations.
Presentational tools
JavaScript 1.1 and 1.2, cookies and Flash 3 are supported.
Downloadable files
The user cannot download files when using this system. A system CD should be running within the game console to load the browser, so there is no storage capability.
