How to create page which can be viewed Handhelds like Mobile communicator OR PDA.

Hi Friends,
All these days I am using PHP and MySql, very cool stuff for

Web site development. I would like to develope a site which can

be viewed by Handheld devices such as Mobile Communicators,

PDA
having PalmOS OR PocketPC OR Windows CE as OS. I think

only change will be in creating display page. I think display page

must be in some format of XML. I am not getting any clue exactly

what type of XML these OS support. I am absolute new to XML.
I will be thankful if you give me any article link which will be give

me this information.
Are their any editor avilable (xmlspy?)which creates XML pages

for PalmOS OR PocketPC OR Windows CE as OS.
Visualstudio.net creates display page for PocketPC OR Windows

CE but it is very expensive for me. Also It will not create page for

PalmOS.
Help appreciated.

Well, WML is the language you're looking for. Although I think most of those browsers will display simple html, too.

One thing to look into might be creating your pages in xml, then using xslt to create the html or wml depending on which browser hits it.

Hi,
There is an article at "http://www.devarticles.com/content.php?articleId=105&page=1" which gives following information.
It says:
"Microsoft released version 2.2 of its XSL ISAPI filter at the beginning of March 2002. This version replaces the previous version, 2.1, which was released in February of 2001. The XSL ISAPI filter is an extension to Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) that simplifies the deployment of server-side XSL stylesheets. It automatically runs on the server whenever a special type of file (.pasp) is requested. It supports multiple device types including the web browser, WAP enabled phone, PDA, etc. XSL is used to transform XML at the presentation level, and the output from an XSL stylesheet can be formatted according to the device type requesting it.

The XSL ISAPI filter uses XSL stylesheets to automatically format dynamically generated XML content (via ASP) for the correct device type (HTML, WML, etc), as shown in the diagram below:
"

1) If this can be done with ASP then why not with PHP?
2) It says that XSL is used to transform XML at the presentation level, and the output from an XSL stylesheet can be formatted according to the device type requesting it.

I think If one can guide me to create XML page using PHP & MySQL. And if XML can be converted to XSL and if XSL stylesheet is formatted as per device type OR OS type. One can do this without Visual Studio.Net
and then web pages can be viewed with any OS and any mobile device.
Thanks
Help Appreciated.

Hi bricker42,
Your links have given me good start in learning XML, XSL and a bit of Sablotron XSLT processor for PHP. Great help.

As I understood. Now flow is as follows.
1) Create aa.XML file.
2) Create bb. xsl file.
3) Upload both files on web server having PHP with Sablotron extension activated.

Using PHP script as follows to convert XML & XSL as follws:

Use xslt_run() function to read and process the XML and XSLT files, and store the results of
the processing in the default result buffer.

xslt_run($xslthandler, $xslfile, $xmlfile);

Once the processing is complete and the output dumped into the default result buffer, use
xslt_fetch_result() function to fetch the contents of the buffer and print it to the browser.

echo xslt_fetch_result($xslthandler);
So far O.K.

My query is how will I know whether output file is '.html file OR wap file or file type used for PDA. Does 'Sablotron' has got options for desired output for browser/wap/PDA outpur format?

What output file format PDA supports?
Whether all mobile phone support (Nokia, Ericsson, samsung, motorala, etc) same wap output format?
What about .html output?

I went through sablotron documentation but could not get information about outpur formats.
Help appreciated.

Thanks.

You'll have to detect the browser yourself. Do that first, then use a different xsl file based on what kind of output you want.

I'm not very familiar with wml, but as far as I know it is a standard, so between that and html you should be able to hit everything.

All of the pda browsers I've seen support html. Try out your page in a text only browser to get an idea of how it will appear (without images, of course).

Thanks for your support. Great help.
Can you guide me How to detect browser? Suggest me link which will give me idea to detect browser.
Thanks.

This oughta help.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/t...821.php3?page=2

Here's a list of user-agent strings. Maybe you can pull something useful out of here, too.
http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208c.html

And, if you feel like interpreting asp, here's a useful page.
http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/chann...rt/default.html

Hi,

All the above comments are all well and good, but I dont understand where the actual XML document comes from (the one that i couple with the XSLT stylesheet to produce my output).

I am using PHP and MySQL, how do I produce my XML file on the fly using data from my MySQL database as i would when generating regular HTML pages?

Alba

Instead of output html, you output xml. They're the same thing, you just use different tags.