Mobile Profile

One of my spare time projects is developing and maintaining a Mozilla Firefox extension, XHTML Mobile Profile. The extension is available for download at Mozilla Update. Recently, there have been some comments that have been fairly critical of the extension and its capabilities, so I feel the need to clarify a few things:

1. application/xhtml+xml is supported by Firefox natively.

But being the standards compliant beast that Firefox is, the rendering only occurs if the correct namespace is added to the root html tag.

For a simple demonstration (requires Mozilla Firefox), compare this page (source) with this one (source). The first shows the content unformatted, but the second page is rendered by Firefox as it has been told the namespace of the document.

2. WML support is available using the WML Browser.

There is no need for the XHTML Mobile Profile extension to support WML as this is already provided by the WML Browser.

3. XHTML Mobile Profile supports only application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml

Given 1 and 2 above, this is the only content type that required support as the others for mobile content are already covered. I must admit that I need to provide more detail on the Mozilla Update site that sets peoples expectations.

I’ll work on that next.

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