WML-like solution for iPhone

Question

We are developing a web application that should be accessible from a mobile phone.

It involves a simple text-only tree catalog.

To avoid extra round-trips to the server to expand the tree items as you click on them, I decided to use WML.

It allows preloading multiple <card>'s in one document and fast browsing between these <card>'s.

However, iPhone does not support WML at all and other mobile browsers have multiple issues with it.

Is there a technology that allows loading multiple pages into iPhone's browser and browsing between them without extra round-trips to the server?

Answer 1

I think one trick is to load a page with 320px wide divs and have it scroll horizontally via Javascript. You can make the iPhone hide the horizontall scrollbars.

Answer 2

Would a Tiddlywiki work?

As far as I know, you can use the 'tiddlers' aspect of a tiddlywiki to show/hide small amounts of web content without having to make trips to the server?

Answer 3

It's not exactly the same as WML, but Joe Hewitt's iUI was developed on the very same idea of preloading different <div>'s corresponding to different pages, and facilitate navigation between them.

Here is an example:

http://iui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/REL-current/samples/music.html

Look at the source code in order to see how each <div> or <ul> is actually a different page. You can also dynamically add pages using AJAX.

Answer 4

If you are developing the site only for the iPhone I would recommend the excellent jQTouch plugin for jQuery. It allows you to store pages in seperate div tags and then navigate between them without refreshing the page.

Answer 5

I can't vote yet, but I did check out link text and it is awesome. I was working on something like that for screen prototyping, but I did not put 2-and-2 together to see its practical utility.

Clarification on the mis-formed link: I was referring to the iUi linkage for the CSS that creates div sections with the appropriate artwork to look as if the web content is generated by the iPhone Application. This is a great complement to an end-to-end solution.

I vote with both thumbs up if I could ...

I will also check out the jQTouch plugin jQuery as that may be a more proprietary way to go for licensed content.