Proposal for W3C/OpenAjax Alliance Workshop on Mobile Ajax
August 15, 2007
DHTML and Ajax in Mobile Search
My Interest and Background
I am the lead engineer on AOL's new mobile search
product, which just launched yesterday at http://wap.aol.com/portal/searchindex.do
and is covered by
several blogs, including GigaOm
..
Right now, we're using DHTML for those smartphone browsers which can
handle it (e.g. Pocket IE on Windows Mobile), and we have some Ajax
features in the pipeline. This is all pretty unique for current mobile
search engines.
At the Mobile Ajax workshop, I hope to shared the lessons learned and
best practices during development of AOL Mobile Search. At the same
time, I
would like to:
1) See what
other search applications are doing with this technology.
2) Find tools
and mobile Ajax frameworks to make my job
easier.
3) Discuss standards and open API's for mobile search and
widgets.
"My smartphone can do Ajax, but where are the apps?"
Until recently, smartphones were a high-end niche device for the
business professional: expensive and mostly relegated to e-mail. Some
devices can attempt to browse the "full" Web, but the screens are
tiny, layouts squashed, and scripting support (much less Ajax) lacking
or nonexistent. As a result, smartphone users end up going back to
the same static and boring XHTML-MP formatted sites that simple WAP
phone users went to. Mobile website designers could create a template
for smartphones, but why bother if the segment was too small and
fragmented and speeds too slow for rich media over mobile?
In the past year or two, that has all changed. Most smartphones,
notably Windows Mobile and Symbian S60, support JavaScript and
Ajax over speedy 3G networks. At the same time, these powerful devices
are so stylish and cheap now that they've crossed over into the
mainstream.
For
example, the Samsung Blackjack, HTC Dash, and Motorola Q (all Windows
Mobile) can usually be had "free with activation". As a result, the
demographic has expanded past business users and early adopters to the
rest of the
population. However, with
the exception of the iPhone, smartphone-optimized applications are
still nonexistent. Smartphone
browsers are stuck in a no-man's land: able to browse the same XHTML-MP
sites as WAP phones, but still lacking the scripting support to render
most dynamic content formatted for the desktop.
One might argue that using a "full" Web browser like Opera Mobile or
the iPhone over the more-limited Pocket Internet Explorer would be the
solution, but it's only half the solution. Firstly, Windows Mobile
users would have to buy and install Opera Mobile themselves. And then
these users would soon find the zooming in and out and panning a small
window over a multi-column page a less than ideal experience. The
screens
are simply too small. Most users would still prefer a mobile-specific
version of the site over the desktop-formatted version. In short,
mobile web applications still need to be specifically designed to
support smartphones.
Mobile Search and the "Long River" Layout
Mobile search is one critical application, but it poses some
interesting problems with navigation.
Since most WAP phones cannot perform horizontal scrolling and have
small screens, mobile pages are formatted as such, with one single long
column. Pages are usually broken up into manageable chunks, but
scrolling through these line by line can be quite tedious. With
mobile search, the problem is exacerbated because results from all
categories are listed in one especially long page. And sometimes, the
ads themselves take up half the screen. All
mobile search engines seem to follow this long river layout. Now
Yahoo! OneSearch uses "skip" links to
move to the next block of results, and has other links to refine the
search and move back to the top of the page. These work quite well,
but are still clunky. What are the alternatives? For WAP phones
restricted to XHTML-MP, there isn't much more that can be done besides
going to an on-demand downloaded application in Java ME, BREW, or .NET
CF, but those have their own issues with cross-platform development.
For smartphones with client-side scripting capabilties, the technology
is there for an easier and more elegant solution.
DHTML Content Tabs
For AOL Mobile Search, we've attempted to solve the problem by having
DHTML content tabs that dynamically update with no refresh, Currently,
this works in Pocket IE, NetFront, and Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile,
as well as the iPhone. We are testing with other platforms like
Symbian S60. At the same time, the "long river" layout is used as a
fallback for WAP phones.
The tabbed navigation greatly enhances the search experience, as the
navigation tabs are always visible on the screen. As a results, users
are encouraged to casually fast-switch among content categories. So
where do we go from here?
On-Demand Loading of Search Results
The mantra of mobile search is getting the user focused results as fast
as possible and with the least effort. e.g. when you search on
weather, you get the weater. For a stock ticker symbol like "GOOG",
you get Google's last price and perhaps a nice daily chart. Part of
Google's success is its speed. In the world of mobile, latency is
magnified, and sometimes results don't come back quite as fast you'd
like. Wouldn't it be nice to have the slower results load on-demand in
a hidden tab while you peruse the results that have come back quickly?
Even in Pocket IE, this is definitely doable with Ajax.
Rich Mobile Widgets
In the context of mobile search, a lot of our content sources are
essentially widgets: i.e. local weather, stock chart, movie listings,
maps, etc. With Ajax, some level of interactivity could be brought to
those widgets. For example, the stock ticker or weather forecast might
update in real-time. Even better is if widgets were standardized so
that they could be plugged into any mobile home page or search?
Conclusion
We are in a critical transition period for rich web applications on
mobile devices. Smartphones are now powerful enough to support
client-side scripting and Ajax, while becoming cheap enough to attain
widespread adoption. To satisfy this increasing demand for rich web
applications on smartphones and kick off the innovation, AOL just
released a mobile search engine that uses DHTML tabs to make navigation
faster and more intuitive. In the mobile search arena, we will see
more DHTML and Ajax used for on-demand loading of results and
interactive widgets, among many other uses.
alan
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Alan Tai | E-mail: Alan.Tai@corp.aol.com | AIM: alantwm | AOL Search Dev