Chapter 10. Mobile Device Support
| In version 1.0 of the .net Framework, the core controls from the WebControls and HtmlControls namespaces were "hard-coded" to create HTML output. This makes sense because most ASP.NET pages are aimed at standard Web browsers that recognize only HTML (albeit different versions, such as HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.0). However, the growth in the use of mobile devices that don't recognize HTML, such as cellular phones that connect to the network through the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), means that Microsoft has had to consider how ASP.NET can support such devices. The result for version 1.0 of the Framework was the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit (MMIT), which was released as a separate install that added the classes required to the Framework class library. In version 1.1 of the Framework, the MMIT controls became the ASP.NET Mobile Controls and were integrated into the class library rather than being a separate install, but this still doesn't solve the real underlying issues. In particular, what is the best way to make it easier for developers to create pages that work on different types of client devices without having to learn new programming techniques and new APIs as well as figure out the complex matrix of capabilities of the multitude of device types in use today? In this chapter, we'll look at support for mobile devices and different types of markup requirements by examining the following:
We'll start with a look at the whole issue of supporting different types of client browsers.  |
