Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This had potential to be a useful book, but it is undermined by several serious flaws. First, and perhaps least likely to be noticed, is that it is heavily biased towards the WAP implementation of a single company. While the particular implementation used is not a bad one, the book fails to stress that there are many areas where implementations can differ. A developer relying only on the advice in this book will be in for a rude shock when browsers from other companies are tried.
Secondly, others have commented on the formatting, but the book's lack of organization, unhelpful syntax summaries (including the cryptic "content abbreviations") and the completely inadequate index all add up to a book that is unusable as a reference.
Finally, the book contains far more errors and misleading statements than is acceptable. An exhaustive list would take be far too long to post (and take more time to compile than I care to invest), but just to demonstrate that this is not an empty complaint, let's look at what leaps to the eye between pages 30 and 36. Despite what you read here:
- A nonbreaking space is not a space that can't be removed, it is a space that can't be used as a line break.
- A soft hyphen is not required to be displayed if it falls at the end of a line; user agents can choose to ignore it entirely.
- White space can, in fact, appear between the attribute name, equals sign, and value.
- The quotation marks example has an obvious editing error that means the two paragraphs are not equivalent.
- A WML deck is not conceptually the same as an HTML page; it has no HTML counterpart.
- A WML card does not have to be a SINGLE unit of user interaction, as user agents can render a card as multiple units.
- The XML declaration is invalid.
- A deck can, if needed, possess id and class attributes.
- The discussion of meta information is misleading and promises more than is required by the WML specification.
- The newcontext attribute does not require the device be reset to a known state.
- The card title is not necessarily the default bookmark title, although some user agents may use it as such.
- The statement that visible content must be enclosed in a
element is not completely true.
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