Some say that its best to have one document to serve all audiences. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about this idea in his book “Designing with Web Standards” While it’s a nice thought, and simplifies things for developers, it doesn’t work all the time. Now I’m not trying to go head-to-head with the Big Z, but rather I’m trying to my best to provide an optimal experience for a mobile user.

Think about a news site like CNN. It’s not uncommon to see a related video or some large images on a page, next to the story. If I went to that same site on my Palm Treo, I’d download all that media because it’s part of the markup. That’s unfair to the mobile user, since most cant view it. That’s especially true for those who pay for the data beyond what their wireless service contracts allow. I’ve tried changing the setting on my treo to not download images. But what really happens is they seem to get downloaded anyway, but not displayed. Now I’m not complaining (well maybe just a little), but I think that it’s currently not feasible at the moment.

As I mentioned in my post for the Engadget to Palm blog entry, the mobile stylesheet doesn’t work on my treo when a screen style sheet is available. But lets pretend it did work. Would doing tricks like display:none in a style sheet be enough for mobile users. From what I’ve read lately some screen readers don’t respect display:none.

Another approach is to serve a separate set of files. Each of the sites in my top 5, use this approach and it works well for them. We the users get a better experience because of it. I’m sure the developers of these sites are reusing most of their code from the main website. Sure, it’s a little extra work to maintain, but nowhere close to building another full scale website. So what’s the harm?

This afternoon I found this Engadget blog entry titled “Dear Palm: It’s time for an intervention“. I agree with much of what is said in this article. I would like to offer a couple of additional suggestions, most of which are specific to mobile developers.

Consistent Screen size and resolution – With all the differences is devices, it can be nearly impossible to design an attractive mobile website. So standard across your product lines. Screen size and resolution are extremely important.

Follow web standards. The firefox and opera browsers are do an incredible job of following web standards. With web developers around the world using CSS for presentation and XHTML for structure, for Palm for conform to the standards will make developers want to develop on it. This is much in the same way that we use Firefox to build our websites, then fix the quirks in IE.

I recently added a handheld stylesheet to my website, so I could deliver an attractive experience to my mobile audience. I discovered that if a screen stylesheet is present, the mobile stylesheet is ignored! Why? You should only be using the screen style sheet if there isn’t a handheld stylesheet present. A better idea would be to make a preference to the user of what to do when a handheld style sheet is unavailable – use the screen stylesheet OR User-specified Style Sheet, or browser default settings.

View Source. Please add this to the browser menu.

Power Button. I use a Treo 700p from verizon. Just under the bottom right corner of my screen, is a red button. It looks like a power button. It’s not. When I hold it down, it turns of the phone. The device is still on. So I cant make calls AND the battery is still consuming power. Why is there not a button/switch to turn off the device? The only way for me to currently “turn it off” is to take out the battery. That’s bad. Please fix that.

New Browser. Perhaps instead of maintaining Blazer, you could donate a couple of developers to make Mozilla’s Minimo or the Opera Mini browser work on all Palm products. Start with the Treo line and go forward from there. I tried a while to install Opera Mobile, but it required a JVM. I wasn’t able to install that, so I moved on.

Hardware. Some people think the phones could be thinner. I happen to like the way the treo 700p feels in my hand. Its nice and solid (it doesn’t feel like a wussy RAZR), yet it is still thin enough to fit in my jeans front pocket. I’d try to thin it a little bit, but not much. The keyboard is great. Don’t touch it!

I rediscovered a blog posting from Cameron Moll about the development of the Mobile web. Its from 2005, but it still makes sense. As a few people mentioned, the U.S. is far behind in the mobile web development from. So this blog posting will likely be ironically timely for us in the U.S. BTW, he just wrote a book on mobile web development.I’d like to start my contribution by listing my top 5 best mobile sites. The list contains the sites that give me the best experience on my Palm Treo 700p. The links in this list point to the mobile sites and should be viewed on your PDA

1. Fandango – a movie listing site
2. The Weather channel – Provides local weather (and so much more) information based on your zipcode.
3. ABC news - A major US television network
4. GMail – Mobile version of Google’s Mail client.
5. The Onion – A satirical news site.

As part of my education for mobile development, I’ve added a mobile style sheet to my personal website.  Mobile development is more than just adding a style sheet. It’s also about using the markup effectively. One idea that was very useful was the Leahy/Landridge image replacement technique. This allowed me to use the heading tags so all clients can access that markup. I then applied the technique in my css file for desktop users, and used simple styling for the mobile users. This way, the mobile user still gets a nice experience without the extra download.

I’m interested in what techniques have worked for you. So if you have one you’d like to share, let me know.

Months back I heard that Yahoo was working on the Pipes project. I had since forgotten what it was all about, so I looked it up yesterday. The homepage for the project describes it as follows :

“Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.”

This is pretty accurate. Although, the best part about it is the interface. They’ve managed to accomplish what others have not – made it possible to create an application without writing a line of code. Their interface is intuitive, flexible, and indeed powerful . Other than watching this introductory video , I haven’t yet experienced their documentation. I created my first pipe, using the data on Craigslist. Pretty simple. Then I found someone else’s pipe that was similar but better – so I cloned it, then modified it

I’m an avid reader of news online, particularly topics that pertain to personal technology, web development, and software applications. So I searched the pipes library for one specific to tech news. I used the RSS output of my selected pipe to read my news this morning.

Happy computing!