cHTML Loose

9:42PM

I just started building an i-mode version of my website. i-mode allows people to access websites via their cellular phone. I was not sure what version(s) of HTML were supported by i-mode, so I went to the development page. Hmm... this is a beast that I don't think I've dealt with before: Compact HTML (cHTML). The W3C says:

The Compact HTML is a well-defined subset of HTML 2.0[1], HTML 3.2[2] and HTML 4.0[3] recommendations, which is designed for small information appliances. HTML defines flexible, portable, and practical document format for the documents on the Internet.

That doesn't sound too bad, and the Compact HTML Tag List ain't that ugly either. The i-mode development page also offers their own specification document for download in PDF. I download the document, open it, start reading... and start sobbing. A caption from the document:

cHTML is a combination of tags from the HTML 1.0, 2.0 and 4.0 and some mobile extensions.

Uhm... that is not quite the same as the W3C TR states. The sad thing about it is that this (mis)interpretation of the definition goes one —and gets worse— in the specification. Where did blink come from all of a sudden? Wait... no, they didn't... marquee? You are kidding me... right? Right? Oh well, I guess we could label these as the mobile extensions they mentioned earlier.

Elsewhere in the specification they tell us to mark up line-breaks like <br /> for XHTML compatability. I thought that was pretty funny, considering that with the use of something like blink or marquee, there's is no way to make a document comply with any XHTML DTD but a custom one — something they don't mention in the document and I doubt will be properly supported.

In my opinion they should have been better of with on of these two solutions:

  1. Stick to the Compact HTML TR of the W3C (which is not XHTML).
  2. Create a complete specification (including custom DTD).

I, myself, think I'd be better of using the W3C Technical Reports and Publications for markup and style references, and use the i-mode specification document for all other referces (maximum file sizes, file type support, etc.) Now that I've got that out of the way, I will try this again.

By the way, I feel like complete shit. I think I need Prozac... or something.