Leonardo da Vinci Programme – Project RO/03/B/P/PP175006 LESSON G14_EN. PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES FOR WORKING ON INTERNET. ePUBLISHING FOR MOBILE IN XHTML LANGUAGE. Parent Entity: IPA SA, Bucharest, Romania, 167 bis, Calea Floreasca, e-mail: [email protected];Fax: + 4021 316 16 20 Authors: Mariana Bistran, Principal Researcher, IPA SA, Bucharest, Romania, 167 bis, Calea Floreasca, Fax: + 4021 318 00 51 Professor Gheorghe Mincu Sandulescu, PhD, IPA SA, Bucharest, Romania, 167 bis, Calea Floreasca, e-mail: [email protected]; Fax: + 4021 318 00 51, Consultations: Every working day from 9.00 a.m. to 12.00 p.m.. After studying this lesson, you will acquire the following knowledge: To achieve the communication via the Internet between mobiles and computers by the XHTML standard language CONTENT OF THE LESSON 1. INTRODUCTION IN XHTML MOBILE PROFILE LANGUAGE 2. WHICH IS THE BASE STRUCTURE OF THE XHTML BASIC LANGUAGE? 3. DIFFERENCES AND RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN XHTML AND WML LANGUAGES 4. SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR WRITING, TESTING AND PERFORMING THE XHTML BASIC PAGES FOR MOBILES 5. HOW TO BUILD A SIMPLE MOBILE PAGE IN XHTML MOBILE PROFILE LANGUAGE? 6. HOW TO INSERT WML PAGES AND WML SCRIPTS IN XHTML MP PAGES WITH STYLE SHEETS 7. HOW TO REALIZE AN XHTML SITE LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After covering the lesson you will acquire knowledge about: The resemblances of the XHTML standard language destined for mobile devices with the HTML language. The base structure and the resemblance between the XHTML language and WML language. The creation, testing and validation of XHTML pages of the mobiles. The insertion of picture images, lists with menus of the table in XHTML pages of the mobiles. The creation of text files with style sheet in XHTML pages of mobiles. The mechanism for the introduction of WMLScript into mobile xHTML pages 1. INTRODUCTION TO XHTML MOBILE PROFILE LANGUAGE The activity of electronic publishers on the Internet is based on the communication of different intelligent devices connected to the Web world such as the PC, small dimension devices as the portable devices PDA, WAP mobile phones, etc. The study of XHTML MP language (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language-Mobile Profile) is important for the creation of web pages for mobile devices using the standardized languages, complying with the recent standards in the field of navigation technologies on the web, allowing the communication on the Internet both for classical computers, laptops, and for mobile devices, PDA, headphones, pagers, etc. The Basic XHTML language is present in the most spread language of communication of the mobiles and it achieves the compatibility between the web contents developed for the classical browsers Web and the content developed for micro- browser destined to the mobile devices, with small capacities of display and reduced memory dimensions. The WAP2.0 Specification contains the definitions of the XHTML, WML and WML Script languages and allows the insertion inside the XHTML MP language of modules developed of WML and WML Script language. XHTML Basic Standard is very close to HTML MP language and is an application of the XML language (Extensible Markup Language), having the following main features: XHTML Basic is the most spread language of communication with mobile devices (mobile, Televisions, PDA, Vending machines, Pagers, Car navigation systems, Mobile game machines, Digital book readers, Smart watches). XHTML Basic was realized on the initiative of the Consortium: World Wide Web’s Consortium’s (W3C). The language is based on common tags for WiFi radio mobile devices and small devices with limited memory. WAP 2.0 Standard allows introducing directly of WML and WML Script language into XHTML MP programmes. Performing the extension of XHTML Basic language with modules, elements and attributes for the enrichment of the contents for mobile devices. The standard XHTML MP language is an extension for mobile devices of the XHTML Basic language, and it brings supplementary functions as: 179 Leonardo da Vinci Programme – Project RO/03/B/P/PP175006 • To use the text files named internal style sheets for the display formatted on mobile display. • It contains an insertion mechanism of script in content pages. 2. WHICH IS THE BASE STRUCTURE OF THE XHTML BASIC LANGUAGE? The XHTML Basic language contains the following marking /label modules which are familiar to us from HTML language: Structure: <body>, <head>, <html>, <title> Text: <br>,<div>,<em>,<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5>,<h6>,<kbd>,<p>,<pre>,<span>,<strong>,<var> Hypertext: <a> List: <dl>, <dt>, <dd>, <ol>, <ul>, <li> Form: <form>, <input>, <label>, <select>, <option>, <textarea> Tables: <caption>, <table>, <td>, <th>, <tr> Image: <img> Link: <link>. What are the most advanced features? The following supplementary modules of marking are introduced by XHTML MP language over XHTML Basic language: Form : <fieldset>, <optgroup> Links lists : attribute “start” for ordered lists -> <ol>, attribute “value” for element from list -> <li> Text Presentation: bold -> <b>, uppercase -> <big>, table header -> <hr>, italic-> <i>, lowercase -> <small> Scripts: <noscript>, <script> Attributes and style sheets: element <style>. 3. DIFFERENCES AND RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN XHTML AND WML LANGUAGES In XHTML MP Language, along the modification from the classic HTML language, the following new declarations are introduced: XML Declaration which informs the browser on the application type XML, version “1.0”, whose standard is applied to the markings from the respective document and to characters’ encoding. Definition of the new type of document file (DTD) as XHTML text source file; the definition files *.DTD are used to the syntax analysis of the delimiting tags as in HTML and XHTML languages and also in XML, and they are inserted automatically by the mobile pages editors, inside the respective pages files. Three types of definition files DTD are known: a. transnational: and which is used in web pages with the marking <font> and will be accessible to the browsers which do not work with the files “style sheet “; b. strict: all the displaying mobile pages are introduced by formatted files, of the type “style sheet“ ; c. Frameset: to the division of the mobile screen in more frames, displayed simultaneously on the same screen. The root marking: different from WML language, html must be used in XHTML language <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile11.dtd"> The <HTML> tag, previously used only for the web page formatting, now controls the following features of the contents: Information about the file type *.xhtml of the respective web page, The attribute xmlns through which we define the value of the document “namespace” which is the URL address of the mobile XHTML definitions, It declares the document file in the language by lang= “en“. Differently from WML language, in XHTML mobile pages it is not necessary to manage the card markings. Similarly to WML language, which accepts comments, inside XHTML mobile pages it is permitted to use the comments having the form <!- - …… - - >. Inside XHTML and WML mobile pages the same tags can be used: <p>, <i>, <b>, <a>, <li>, <ol>, <ul>, <td>, <th>, <tr>, <td>, <br/>, <form>, <input>, <option>, etc. which are familiar from the HTML language. 180 Leonardo da Vinci Programme – Project RO/03/B/P/PP175006 4. SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR WRITING, TESTING AND PERFORMING THE XHTML BASIC PAGES FOR MOBILES DEVICES In XHTML language, the creation and validation of the programs and displaying on the mobile screen devices are achieved based on the NOKIA Mobile Simulator, the program Micro-browser from Nokia named NOKIA Mobile Browser 4.0 and which can be obtained free from the Forum Nokia site : http://www.forum.nokia.com/. To install the micro-browser of mobile from Nokia you will proceed similarly as in the lesson G(7P1_EN): Programming Languages For Work on the Internet. WML Language. The Mobile Simulator NOKIA-SDK works with the Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit 4.1.(NMIT4.1) application of NOKIA (NMIT 4.1.) which is obtained also free from the Nokia Forum server, www.forum.nokia.com . To obtain the NMIT 4.1 application to create and validate the content for mobile devices the procedure is similar as for the NMIT4.0 simulator and following the authentication on Forum Nokia site we obtain by e-mail the activation number of the product NMIT4.1. We will proceed similarly for the kit download and its installation on the computer. NMIT4.1 is a tool for authorizing / creating pages of content for work on Internet of the mobiles in language: XHTML, WML and WML Script and achieves the picture images edited WBMP, GIF and which can be previewed and tested on the simulator of Nokia SDK mobile. The browsing program OPERA Internet Browser can be used as micro-browser for surfing and validation of the mobile pages achieved in XHTML language. 5. HOW TO BUILD A SIMPLE MOBILE PAGE IN XHTML MP? The starting element of the mobile page in XHTML language must be obligatorily <html>, and the name for XML namespace: xmlns must be compulsorily the following: xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” Similarly to the known elements from HTML language, each XHTML page must contain at the root as main element, the labels <html> …</html>. The only difference is that the root label <html> must be necessarily followed by the declaration: <html xmlns=www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> The text file *.xhtml of the XHTML page must have the header delimited of labels <head> …</head> and a title introduced between the labels <title>…</title>; in the case of a text contained, this will appear on the top side of the mobile screen. The body of the XHTML page is bordered between the labels <body> and </body>. The building of a simple XHTML page which displays a text line on the mobile screen is illustrated in the fig.5.1.