Windows Phone Thoughts: WebIS Mobile Site And CSS: The Future of Web Design?

If you hit the WebIS site with a Pocket PC, you'll be in for a nice surprise: a perfectly formatted mobile site. Now here's the interesting part: there's no template wrapper (like we do) or re-direction to another Web page (like some do). Instead, you're looking at the same content: but by using CSS they've enabled mobile devices to view a friendly format of the same content. Here's a quote from, you guessed it, Fabrizio Fiandanese on how he approached the challenge:

"The future is about web standards, about the separation of style from content. How do we achieve it? Creating minimal, meaningful markup, abstracting everything has to do with "look" from the HTML code. All style definitions will be stored into the CSS files. The net result? The minimal HTML code will be readable on every device out there, and we'll have the ability to serve different styles to different clients."

I think this is a great approach to the problem. For many years the expectation has been that a Web site should have a mobile version of their site - specially-formatted HTML pages and graphics for mobile devices. Then, as the separation of content and form became more common, we had database-driven sites that had mobile-device friendly templates. Not every site is database driven, however, so this wasn't a practical solution for everyone. This CSS solution is interesting because it can apply equally well to static or dynamic content, and a variety of devices can be targeted. My Web design Kung-Fu has become weak, but from where I'm sitting this seems like an excellent solution.

So if you're a Web designer, it's time to start thinking about using CSS to format your content in such a way that any computing device can consume the content. We're looking at doing the same thing here. And if you're a business looking to do something similar with your site, Fabrizio is the person to talk to. ;-)