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future of content adaptation
Over on the Mobile Design and wmlprogramming mailing lists, Pedro Barros José asked views on content adaptation (minor corrections made):
- What is the future of Content Adaptation?
- What are the main factors dictating that future?
- Who will be the main players?
To help further streamline the discussion, let me know categorize the different types of Content Adaptation (inline with the W3C).
- Server-side Adaptation: where the web server employs some type of device detection together with a Device repository, to then optimize the content sent to the requesting device based on the device’s capabilities (e.g. Drutt, MobileAware, Volantis, etc).
- Network Adaptation: web content is altered or “transposed” by one or more network components (e.g. Opera Mini, the infamous Novarra transcoder used by Vodafone)
- Client side Adaptation: reformatting of content typically done on the device by a mobile browser (e.g. Opera Mobile browser)
Essentially looking at answers/opinions to the above 3 questions for each of the above 3 categories.
In short, content adaptation is here to stay. Not all web sites will have mobile-friendly versions, so gateways and/or clients will do some sort of adaptation. This will continue for as long as mobile screens stay small.
Some sites will make mobile versions, either through complete redesigns or through content adaptation processes. These will be high volume sites or mobile-targeted sites (sites for which there is a strong business case for a mobile version).
Why? Small screens, long tail sites. Time and money.
The only real problem with network adaptation is non-consensual transcoding: I make a mobile site and the transcoder assumes that its automatic system can create a better user experience than my mobile-focused version. Ha. But if you listen to the defenders of this process, you'll notice that I am not putting words into their mouths.
Using the above definitions, server-side adaptation allows the people who know the purpose of the content and the goals of the user to best adapt the site to their users' needs. Any other solution is suboptimal from a user's perspective — assuming server-side adaptation is done well!
Don't believe me? Then why, with the iPhone's fancy high end two-processor largish screen browser do companies still make iPhone-specific web sites? Because the experience is better. Zooming is a low price to pay to get otherwise unavailable information, but a high price to pay for very frequently used content.
Network adaptation is a system that makes assumptions about the intentions of the site based on how the markup is structured. This is a very hard problem, made far simpler by limiting themselves to XHTML and CSS. Even if we assume that they get even better and can magically translate all Javascript into dynamic HTML or something and make it work on scroll and select devices, they still don't really know the users' goals. This doesn't mean that the site owner really does either; I would like to tag and archive my email within Gmail mobile, but I can't. But I prefer Gmail mobile to a transcoded Gmail full sized.
Theoretically the semantic web can fix all of this. If all web pages were coded fully semantically, then maybe a system could be devised to do best-case layout for all situations. Don't hold your breath: in 2005 there were 11.5 billion indexable pages on the web. Besides, the web diverged from a semantic viewpoint to a visual viewpoint in 1996 or so.
On top of all of this, mobiles are not miniature computers. They are much more: cameras, companions, texters, connectors. Do we really want to limit mobile web to a stripped down version of the desktop web? No.
To me, the best thing to come out of the Luca vs. Novarra/Vodafone and Luca vs. W3C arguments is a concrete list of best practices for not destroying this hard work and making things worse.
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