Content adaptation
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Content adaptation is the action of transforming content to adapt to device capabilities. Content adaptation is usually related to mobile devices, which require special handling because of their limited computational power, small screen size, and constrained keyboard functionality. Content adaptation could roughly be divided to two fields: # Media content adaptation that adapts media files. # Browsing content adaptation that adapts a website to mobile devices.


Browsing content adaptation

Advances in the capabilities of small, mobile devices such as mobile phones (
cell phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
s) and Personal Digital Assistants have led to an explosion in the number of types of device that can now access the
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
. Some commentators refer to the Web that can be accessed from mobile devices as the Mobile Web. The sheer number and variety of Web-enabled devices poses significant challenges for authors of websites who want to support access from mobile devices. Th
W3CDevice Independence Working Group
described many of the issues in its repor
Authoring Challenges for Device Independence
Content adaptation is one approach to a solution. Rather than requiring authors to create pages explicitly for each type of device that might request them, content adaptation transforms an author's materials automatically. For example, content might be converted from a device-independent markup language, such as XDIME, an implementation of the
W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
'
DIAL
specification, into a form suitable for the device, such as XHTML Basic,
C-HTML NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a mobile internet (distinct from wireless internet) service popular in Japan. Unlike Wireless Application Protocols, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail, and the packet- ...
, or WML. Similarly, a suitable device-specific
CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
style sheet or a set of in-line styles might be generated from abstract style definitions. Likewise, a device specific layout might be generated from abstract layout definitions. Once created, the device-specific materials form the response returned to the device from which the request was made. Another way is to use the latest trend responsive design based on
CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
, covered i
this
article ( RWD). Content adaptation requires a processor that performs the selection, modification, and generation of materials to form the device-specific result. IBM's Websphere Everyplace Mobile Portal (WEMP), BEA Systems' WebLogic Mobility Server, Morfeo's
MyMobileWeb MyMobileWeb is an open-source software, open-source product that simplifies the development of adaptive mobile web applications and portals, providing an advanced content & application adaptation environment. It is based on open standard, open-s ...
, and Apache Cocoon are examples of such processors.
Wurfl WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and an XML configuration file which contains information about device capabilities and features for a variety of mobile devices, focused ...
an
WALL
are popular
Open Source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
tools for content adaptation. WURFL is an XML-based Device Description Repository with APIs to access the data in Java and PHP (and other popular programming languages). WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library) lets a developer author mobile pages which look like plain HTML, but converts them to WML, C-HTML, or
XHTML Mobile Profile XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is a hypertextual computer language standard designed specifically for mobile phones and other resource-constrained devices. It is an XHTML document type defined by the Open Mobile Alliance. XHTML-MP is derived fr ...
, depending on the capabilities of the device from which the HTTP request originates.
GreasySpoon
lets the developer build plugins for content editing, in JavaScript,
Ruby (programming language) Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including pr ...
, and more, just like the Firefox application GreaseMonkey.
Alembik
(Media Transcoding Server) is a Java ( J2EE) application providing transcoding services for variety of clients and for different media types (image, audio, video, etc.). It is fully compliant with OMA'
Standard Transcoder Interface
specification and is distributed under the LGPL open source license. In 2007, the first large scale carrier-grade deployments of content transformation, on existing mass-market handsets, with no software download required, were deployed by Vodafone in the UK and globally for Yahoo! oneSearch, using the Novarra Vision solution. Novarra's content adaptation solution had been used in enterprise intranet deployments as early as 2003(1 October 2003), “Imagistics Deploys Novarra Wireless Web Server” http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-107782549.html Telephone IP News (retrieved 8 October 2009) (at that time, the platform was named “Engines for Wireless Data”).
InfoGin
the 9-year-old content-adaptation company with customers like Vodafone, Orange, Telefónica and PCCW. The patented "Web to Mobile adaptation", Mobile Matrix Transcoder, Multimedia and Documents transcoders, Video adaptation supporte. Launched in 2007, Bytemobile's Web Fidelity Service was another carrier-grade, commercial infrastructure solution, which provided wireless content adaptation to mobile subscribers on their existing mass-market handsets, with no client download required.


See also

* Progressive enhancement, layering technologies such that more features are added for successively more powerful clients. *
Adaptation (computer science) The term “adaptation” in computer science refers to a process where an interactive system (adaptive system) adapts its behaviour to individual users based on information acquired about its user(s) and its environment. Adaptation is one of the ...
*
jQuery Mobile jQuery Mobile is a touch-optimized web framework (also known as a mobile framework), specifically a JavaScript library, developed by the jQuery project team. The development focuses on creating a framework compatible with many smartphones and ta ...
or Zepto *
Responsive architecture Responsive architecture is an evolving field of architectural practice and research. Responsive architectures are those that measure actual environmental conditions (via sensors) to enable buildings to adapt their form, shape, color or character re ...
is an analogous concept, applied to actual building architecture.


References


External links


Authoring Challenges for Device Independence (W3C Working Group Note)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Content Adaptation Web development