The other day I was teaching an Intro to XHTML course. One of the participants was kind enough to demo how she uses her iPaq PDA connected via Bluetooth (short-range wireless networking) to a cellphone to surf the web. While I didn’t ask exactly which model she had it would appear to be 320×240 pixels and thousands of colours. It was most interesting to see this method of surfing in action.
Then last night my friend Amanda let me use her new cellphone for a quick surf. It took me right back 10 years to using Lynx in the days before PPP connections. It displayed about two words per line, about 4 or 5 lines at a time in one colour — black, from memory. Links were enclosed in brackets and you could select a link by pressing the correct button. I was pleased to see this MacTips site worked just fine. Talk about tedious though! You’d need to be pretty dedicated or desperate to do much surfing like that. Still, it proves the point about multiple ways of accessing a site. In the case of my student with the iPaq, she needs to access certain pages from on the road as part of her sales job.
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