WML vs XHTML

A few months ago, an article was published titled Google’s search dominance, stating the following:

According to Masie, a sixth of all internet searches in South Africa come from mobile devices, the highest ratio in the world. To ensure that it leads in the mobile search market Google SA launched its universal search for mobile in January 2008 — only the fourth country in the world to get this service.

Indeed, mobile is going big. However, my concern is more of the technical type.

The relatively high penetration of the mobile web in South Africa was recently brought up again in an article titled The mobile web: an untapped opportunity for publishers. But for me, the following two paragraphs are particularly interesting:

Further, even when excluding internet browsing on mobile phones using the native HTML browsers now available in most high end cellphones or the use of special browsers like Opera MINI (Opera MINI converts regular web pages to render properly on the small mobile screen) the number of unique South African users accessing the mobile internet using WAP is already just about double the size of the number of users accessing the fixed internet.

[…]

A recent Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com) forecasts global shipments of mobile phones with native browser support for HTML browsing environments to hit 66% of handsets shipped in the 2012 calendar year — unfortunately though, the full browser skew will be in the high end phones and the number is therefore likely to be significantly lower in developing markets.

The question is which format(s) to expose. The WAE is the top layer of the WAP stack. The WAE can either be WML or XHTML Mobile. As far as I’m concerned, WML is essentially dead with XHTML Mobile being its replacement. However, it’s not clear which percentage of South Africans have access to only WML or also to XHTML, considering that it’s likely a very small percentage of them will have access to high-end phones.

If there is a significant part of the population with access to WML only, then we need to start catering for it. I have to be honest that I have seen very few new WML sites popping up, while I’m seeing plenty new XHTML Mobile sites popping up. Only a few hours ago, the new Zoopy Mobile launched, for example, which is XHTML Mobile 1.2 just like the Muti Mobile site I set up a couple of months ago.

To set up a mobile site is typically fast, easy and therefore cheap. But another challenge is multimedia formats, in particular video, and from what I can tell there is a general standardisation problem in that department at the moment. But the guys at Zoopy would obviously know much more about that than me. :)

So, the only time we will really know what we need to do is when we have proper user agent capability statistics, not just penetration ratios, otherwise we will keep shooting in the dark and perhaps exclude the greater part of our potential market.