On the Small Screen, Avoid Big Words - Technology Information

Industry Standard, The, April 9, 2001 by Marc Weingarten

When it comes to putting content on the wireless Web, give your customers what they want -- and nothing else.

REMEMBER WHEN TEXT AND SIMPLE GRAPHICS ruled the Web and Java was something you put in a thermos? That's pretty much the way life is on the wireless Web today. Those small screens and tiny keypads make delivering anything more than plain text virtually impossible -- and even then it's hard to read more than a line or two at a time.

So where does that leave wireless content providers? Given the mandate to deliver a compelling experience customized for each user, Web editors, designers and engineers must make the most of a not-so-good thing.

"The biggest challenge for wireless is deciding what you want to offer based on the technical constraints of each platform," says Neil Budde, editor and publisher of the Wall Street Journal Online. Budde doesn't aim to deliver the entire daily Journal to his wireless customers. He needs to customize content for individual users -- for instance, serving up headlines and stock quotes on the companies that each subscriber selects -- without exceeding the limited resources of their devices.

Budde's solution is to code Web content in XML, or extensible markup language. Doing so lets the Journal's techies tag different bits of information on the site -- stock prices, company names, dates -- as specific kinds of data rather than undifferentiated HTML. That makes it easier to retrieve only those bits of data each user wants.

Like WSJ.com, CBS MarketWatch.com provides customized business news to its roaming audience. But for MarketWatch, the solution to delivering personalized data is Microsoft's Active Server Pages, a scripting technology that helps developers create dynamic Web content. MarketWatch engineer Arthur Schweiger says ASP provides "tremendous flexibility" for targeting multiple platforms. "We can output to any variety of [programming] languages using ASW," he notes. An added bonus: ASP is easy to learn. MarketWatch's stories are filed to a database using XML; the site then uses ASP to pull individual stories from the database and translate them into wireless-ready format.

(The Standard has a simpler approach to the content-winnowing process: It sends only news headlines and selected highlights from its Media Grok newsletter to wireless readers. It also lets those users search its databases of Internet companies and business leaders.)

Because of the huge volume of data (over 130MB) it churns out each day, MarketWatch needs help delivering it all. For that it turned to Akamai, which caches the content and delivers it as needed to wireless service providers. The result: Customers get content more quickly than if they had to wait for MarketWatch's servers to churn it out. "Akamai provides the horsepower for us to deliver our content efficiently," says MarketWatch engineering systems manager J.R. Cunningham.

Nonetheless, some of the site's graphics have to be toned down for wireless delivery. "All of our charts are four-color GIFs," says Wade Anderson, product manager at MarketWatch. "Our users pay per kilobyte, so you want to make sure everything is small and can be seen easily." New graphics platforms -- Macromedia's Flash Player for Pocket PCs and Hewlett-Packard's MicrochaiVM, a Java clone for handheld devices -- could open up that bottleneck. Market Watch is experimenting with Java for handheld devices to produce little applications like scrolling stock tickers and interactive charts. But don't expect that to become common until broadband, "3G" wireless networks become a reality a year or more from now.

Flash holds more promise. "Working with Flash is great for wireless, because all of the plumbing is built in' says software engineer Phillip Torrone, who has helped design wireless content for a number of firms. "It uses a very thin pipe, so you don't have bandwidth concerns. And there's no language incompatibility. If you're coding inside Flash, you're coding for everything." Flash is widely used for regular, wired Web content, and that ubiquity means it's a natural when a site wants to go wireless. "As far as client-side apps, it's the best product out there," Torrone says.

Delivering content on the wireless Web would be a lot simpler if providers had a single standard to work with. WAP was touted as the lingua franca of wireless, but it has yet to catch on with developers. "WAP's not really there yet," laments WSJ.com's Budde. "It's still got problems." Chief among them: poky download speeds and a cumbersome user interface that severely limits navigability. The truth is that surfing from your cell phone's keypad, as WAP requires, will never be fun. And that's the whole point. The less content providers think of the wireless Web as the Web writ small -- the more they realize that it's an entirely different animal -- the better off they and their customers will be.

Marc Weingarten is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.