Other digital communication media

In the past few years a number of other methods have been made available to users to view information on websites. Different devices, both mobile and static in nature, are beginning to transform the Internet.

Information can be accessed from home via a computer or games console. The same data can be retrieved on the move using mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

In an ideal world, one website could be multi-purposed to allow all of these channels to see the same thing, but unfortunately, this may not always be possible.

This section is aimed at familiarising the web manager with the available media and how best to deal with them. See section 5.2 Your website on television.

Use each checklist to ensure that your web pages comply with these guidelines.

Checklist and summary

Checklist

* Test all pages on as many platforms as possible
* Make content displayable within 544 horizontal pixels
* Avoid the use of small text
* Only use supported code and file formats
* Keep page titles short and descriptive
* Write concise text
* Avoid complex tables and frames
* Only use simple forms
* Do not use server-side or irregular imagemaps
* All pages should be smaller than 250kb

Summary

Web managers should be aware that many of these new browsing modes would cause severe disruption to the end-view of their websites.

Games consoles and browsers on PDAs allow only a small viewable area at any one time and users can find it difficult to scroll up and down.

WAP is a completely different protocol and will not interact with a standard HTML website.

If all these browser modes were to be supported, it would not be unrealistic to suggest that a number of versions of a website will have to be maintained. Content Management Systems and multisource DTDs, XSL-T and XML may well be the saving grace in this field, but much of the technology is quite new and untested by public sector organisations.

Range of browsing devices

The world is now a very different place to that of seven years ago. Then, the web was new and all browsing of websites was based on a relatively small monitor, connected to a relatively large computer.

Now users can access an organisation’s website on a wide range of browsing devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones. These all have very different ways of interpreting and rendering data within very different screen sizes.

Three basic questions that a content provider is faced with today are:

* What will the client use to access our information?
* How will we deal with this request?
* How will we manage the data?

The following sections cover some of the more common ways in which data will be accessed and also what Web managers can do to ensure that their information is displayed correctly on them.