Designing Wireless Information Services

This book is intended for people who design the structure and presentation of Web sites. It is not a programmer's book. The intent is to understand how the underlying applications can help you give your users a better experience, not how to design the software that produces it. The examples I give are not programming examples, but examples to help you understand how the user experience will change in the mobile environment.

How This Book Is Organized ?

• Chapter 1. - Mobility and the Wireless Web," explains what mobility is about, what restrictions the wireless environment imposes on you, and how the restrictions affect the information you want to present.
  
• Chapter 2. - "Designing Mobile Information," describes how to design the information set behind the presentation and to identify the users' tasks and the objects that make up the page.
  
• Chapter 3. - "Optimizing the Web for Mobile Access," explains what you can do to optimize your Web site for mobile access and make it more accessible in general.
  
• Chapter 4. - "XML, WAP, and Mobile Information Systems," explains how XML works, why it is important, how WML works, what XHTML (the successor to HTML) is and how it works, and how XSLT can be used to tie them together.
  
• Chapter 5. - "Building a Mobile Information Site: By Example," offers a few simple case studies, which are intended to convince you that the stuff 1 talk about works, if you didn't believe it by now.
  
• Chapter 6. - "'Personalized Services: Adapting Information to Position and User Context," peeks a little bit into the future and talks about how you can use content adaptation, position relevance, and contextualization to build the mobile applications in the next generation of technology,
  
• Chapter 7.- "Future Mobile Network Technologies," and Chapter 8, "'Future Mobile and Multimedia Applications," describe some future technologies, including IP over wireless, which will be here within three years, and discusses how they will affect the technologies we use.
  

If you are just curious about the new wireless technologies, read only Chapter 1 and 7. If all you want to know is how to make your Web site perform better, read only Chapter 3. If your interest is to understand how XML works in the mobile environment Chapter 4 is for you. If you are a manager, the preface should be sufficient. But if you are interested in how it all interconnects, and if you want to understand why as well as how, you have to read the entire book.

What's on the CD-ROM

With this book you get a CD that contains some software I have found useful. The most important thing on the CD is the Ericsson WAPIDE SDK, a development kit for WML applications that contains a structured editor and a device simulator, so you can see how your WML cards will appear. The WAPIDE SDK package also contains the WMLLIB PERL library, which generates WML from PERL scripts. I have also included the JAFFA java library, which does the same thing from java.

Also included on the CD is some open source software: HTML Tidy, a program to clean up HTML code and turn it into HTML.