Most Internet web pages for PC browsers are authored in HTML. However, in the early days of the mobile Internet (in the late 1990s), HTML was considered too heavyweight for most mobile phone browsers, for these reasons:- The rich set of presentation elements supported in HTML is overkill for many mobile devices, especially low-end devices, since the phone screen simply cannot distinguish many font styles and media objects, and it provides limited room for layouts (e.g., frames and tables).
- Most HTML pages are not well-formed XML documents. For example, you can use the tag to open a paragraph without the companion to close the paragraph in HTML, but the software that draws your web pages on the screen has to check the rest of the HTML document to make sure there isn't a stray it should pay attention to. This extra processing is nothing for the powerful CPUs in today's computers, but it can strain the limited CPU in your mobile phone. So, it is considerably more difficult to process irregular HTML than it is to process a well-formed XML document. Desktop web browsers have to perform all sorts of contortions to deal with permutations of HTML tags that have evolved since the early Web.
- After years of browser wars on the PC side, the HTML specification is fragmented with multiple proprietary extensions.
HTML is now fully used by latest mobile phones and almost eclipsed the use of WAP format.
No comments:
Post a Comment