Fundamentally, there is one web. Its content is standardized markup, styles, scripts, and multimedia viewable using web browser.
It is what the people surf in Firefox or Opera or Internet Explorer on the desktop, laptops and netbooks.
The web is the vast collection of servers linked by TCP/IP computer networks. Many of these servers known as web servers implement the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to share document and files.
Web servers provide access by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to text files, markup documents and binary resources.
In an HTTP request, the client sends web server the URI is the desired resource and a collections of request headers, one of which contains a list MIME types that advertise the content types supported on the client.
The Mobile Web uses the plumbing of the Desktop Web and adds new MIME types markup languages document formats and best practices to provide web content optimized for the small screens, resource constrains, and usability challenges of web browsers on mobile devices.
The mobile Web introduces new components into web ecosystem, including;
• Markup languages and styles optimized for mobile devices
• MIME types that differentiate mobile markup from desktop HTML
• Browser clients with a wide variety of capabilities
• Network provides that further adapt your content to cater for those clients
If the Mobile Web is the Wild West, then the Desktop Web is an island paradise. The Desktop Web is a safe and well understood development environment driven by client technologies steeped in established standards.
Desktop browser clients are public, free, freely available and frequently update. Only a handful of software vendors and open source projects produce the dominant web browsers in use today, reducing the testing burden for cross platform web development.
In the desktop ecosystem, if a web page reaches the destination browser, its markup is almost always left unaltered en route by intermediary servers on the internet.
Network owners and Internet Service Providers are not interested in optimizing and improving the web experience though automated markup adaptation and content repacking.
Mobile Web development is a new discipline for these reasons;
• The Mobile Web ecosystem is totally new
• The Mobile Web user is totally new
• The Mobile Web browser is totally new
Mobile Web and Desktop Web
