Introduction

Because of the small screen size and limited memory of Palm OS devices, Web browsers on these devices work differently from browsers on the desktop. Clipper understands a version of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) based on the 3.2 standard, but with several additions that allow you to optimize pages for device display.

Some common features of desktop browsers are missing on the Palm OS. You will find no support for scripting on Web pages. There are no plug-ins for Flash or for playing Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files. Frames are impractical and popping up another window doesn t work unless the user just happens to have an extra Palm OS device nearby. In many ways, it is a throwback to the early days of the Web when Mosaic was in, Java was for set-top boxes, and was a joke rather than a feature.

This may sound primitive, and in many ways it is. However, the lack of features isn t an obstacle to producing good Web clipping applications (WCAs). As a WCA author, you have some advantages a normal Web page author lacks. First, you can assume one page size for most devices. This simplifies the task of page layout and design. Second, user expectations are different. Fancy layout isn t as impressive as clarity of design and speed of accessing information. Finally, smaller and simpler pages are easier to maintain.

In this chapter, the subset of HTML 3.2 supported by Clipper and the elements of HTML 3.2 that are...