Slide 15.18: Microbrowsers
  Slide 16.1: Mobile operating systems
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Microbrowsers (Cont.)

In the simplest microbrowser architecture—used by HTML-based products such as Microsoft's Mobile Explorer—clients get data directly from a Web server. However, this approach is limited by the server's ability to send information in HTML. WAP browsers—such as the Openwave Mobile Browser—commonly use a gateway architecture in which downloaded data first goes to a content-adaptation server, acting as a proxy.

The proxy then formats the content in WML for the target device.

Microbrowsers take four general approaches to accessing Web data:
  1. Wireless language direct access: A microbrowser supports some kinds of wireless languages, such as WML and CHTML, and directly displays the contents written in a language supported by that microbrowser.

  2. HTML direct access: This approach displays the HTML contents directly with, no intervention, but it may distort the contents. For example, large images can not be displayed on microbrowsers.

  3. HTML to wireless language conversion: Some mobile middleware provides conversion software to convert an HTML script to a script of the wireless language supported by that microbrowser. For example, i-mode converts HTML files into i-mode-compatible HTML, CHTML.

  4. Error: If the microbrowsers are not able to handle the contents, they simply display an error code such as “Invalid WML code.”