Une babel d'équipements mobiles

Unlike the desktop web-channel, there is a tremendous amount of fragmentation in the mobile device-channel. Markup can be WML, HTML, HDML, XHTML Mobile Profile, etc. In addition, unlike a standard desktop web-channel, a wireless-device channel will vary on screen size, ability to support client side scripting, ability to support various image formats, and even color. Because the markup is generally sent directly to the phone, there is no opportunity for a central server to "fix" or adapt to browser limitations or defects. Software updates for mobile browsers are rare.

Que faire donc face à la variété des équipements mobiles?

WURFL solves this by allowing development of content pages using abstractions of page elements (buttons, links and textboxes for example). At run time, these are converted to the appropriate, specific markup types for each device. In addition, the developer can specify other content decisions be made at runtime based on device specific capabilities and features (which are all in the WURFL).

The WURFL contains over 500 capabilities for each device, that are broken up into 30 groups. A complete listing of available capabilities is available from the WURFL documentation page. There is an online WURFL test site called Tera-WURFL Explorer that allows one to look up the capabilities of devices based on their user agents and browse through the devices in the current WURFL file.

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