Developing for mobile web in Japan

Useful links for mobile web dev in Japan

http://andreas.web-graphics.com/mobile/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/09/japan%E2%80%99s-super-advanced-mobile-web-too-unique-to-serve-as-a-global-blueprint/

SUMMARY

Technologies as (X)HTML, CSS, ECMAscript and the DOM—“web standards”, in short—are the buzzwords among web developers nowadays. Created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and originally only deployed on a handful of sites, web standards are fast becoming the preferred way for putting content online. The benefits are said to be numerous: pages are lighter and load faster, coding and maintaining a site is less time consuming, search engines can index pages more accurately and disabled users have the advantage of improved accessibility. Additionally, there is the promise of forward compatibility—designs that adhere to web standards are supposed to render on any exotic or even future browsing device, PDA and cellphone browsers being a good example.

One should expect that Japan, with its high penetration rate of advanced mobile handsets, has found the way to standards compliant web design long before anyone else. The reality is different though. Most Japanese websites consist of non-standard markup and are designed with a handful of desktop based browsers in mind—to cellphone users, three flavors of so called “mobile versions” are served, each targeting a different group of mobile browsers. Needless to say, this is a completely different picture than the one-serves-all logic behind web standards.