FAQ

  • What is this tool?

    • mobileelements was built to allow web developers to make an easy switch to mobile web development, by providing tools and education to assist them. We believe in the "teach a man to fish" philosophy, so we're taking our internal tools and api's for building mobile web sites that we've used for over 3 years at 5th Finger, and making them accessible to the world.

  • Do you have a user interface for building a site?

    • No of course not. Is that really what you want? We're determined to build the world's fastest and easiest mobile internet toolkit for you to do it yourself and host the site yourself too. We believe that drag and drop user interfaces and meta-languages that render to xHTML and WML and cHTML are a thing of the past in mobile. Back in the late 90's there were lots of "site-in-a-box" products for building websites. Now, no self respecting web developer would use one of these. We aren't interested in providing a silly WYWISG editors that allows you drop blocks on to a "surface".

  • How do I write the website? What is xHTML?

    • You write it the same way as you would write a web site using xHTML. By the way, xHTML is a fancy way of saying HTML that can be easily understood by browsers.

    Now unfortunately we have to admit that it's not quite the same as you write for modern web browsers as most phones support something call xHTML-MP (mobile profile) which means it is a cut down version of xhtml, you can go read all about it here:
    http://www.developershome.com/wap/xhtmlmp/xhtml_mp_tutorial.asp

    But the short version is that it means that you can use the following elements in your mobile site:

    • Structure
    • Texts
    • Hypertext
    • List
    • Forms
    • Basic Tables
    • Image
    • Object
    • Metainformation
    • Scripting
    • Style Sheet
    • Style Attribute
    • Link
    • Base

    The main difference between the web and mobile development is the user experience design. Hey, you are talking about a screen that measures 2"x4" for my iPhone compared to my 24" desktop screen, so you have to make some compromises. You can read more about how to design a mobile site at: How to design a mobile site

  • How can I insert ads using mobileelements?

    • Well you can control the xHTML, so you can do whatever you like without our permission. However, we're working on some elements that will assist in rendering the correct xHTML for the phone in question. Until then the best way to make money would be to go and visit the following people and ask for their ad documentation:

  • Is this a transcoder?

    • NO WAY, we'll try not to be offended that you would ask. A transcoder implies that we take your website and then automatically morph it into a mobile web site. We don't believe that such a thing is possible let alone practical. A mobile website should be custom built for mobile, and that is what you're here to do. A transcoder will do this without your consent.

    It is pretty easy to avoid most transcoders though, simply use the URL m.mysite.com or mysite.mobi, and make sure that your site produces valid xHTML-MP.

    We work full time in the mobile industry, and don't believe in transcoders. We believe in our hearts that the mobile experience is always …. always going to be different than the web experience.

  • Do you support WML and/or iMode?

    • No we don't. WML is as dead as disco baby[1]. And don't bother with imode unless you really really need to target Japanese phones, and even then think twice.


    WML and iMode is not worth your effort. It's like trying to build a Javascript-capable site to cater for Internet Explorer 4.

    In 2005 WML had less than 1% penetration left in all markets. There are some markets where really old handsets dominate, but they are rare markets, and in that instance the handsets often don't have access to the mobile internet anyway. Almost 100% of handsets now support xHTML-MP[2] or regular old HTML (like the new iPhone). Given that xHTML-MP is a stricter subset of HTML, you can reach every handset with xHTML-MP. xHTML-MP is the language of choice and is sometimes referred to as xHTML WAP 2.0. Don't confuse WML with WAP 2.0, they're different.
    There are some mobile web development tools that sing loudly about the fact that their product can render to cHTML (iMode), WML (old stuff) and other older technologies. Honestly, don't bother contorting your development effort to cater for it. Just write in xHTML-MP and you'll be able to safely reach the broadest possible range of handsets. Just hear this: write your site in xHTML-MP and you'll be happy.
    [1] http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/research/industry/mobilesearch.pdf
    [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML-MP

  • How do I know if your site is reliable?

    • The first thing you can take to heart is that we're a decent size team of technology professionals. mobileelements is supported by at least 5 trained engineers and we're on a rotating support roster. We host mobileelements on the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. This allows us to guarantee your response time... as we get more users we simply add more servers.

  • Can you deliver ringtones and wallpapers?

    • Yep! We take care of hosting and converting your wallpapers and ringtones into all the many colourful formats that different devices support, and provide you with a link to the dynamic content that you can send your consumers to. As for delivery via SMS, you'll need to send content through a mobile messaging company who can deliver the hosted content via SMS, MMS or any other way that your market needs. At 5th Finger, we can do this for you, and get you through the carrier's regulatory stuff. For more info, check out our content system.

  • Do you support video?

    • Sure thing! We recognise the challenge and importance in delivering the richest of content experiences to your consumers. So we spent quite some time making sure we can transcode your videos too. Check out our content system, or for more details around the formats and codecs, visit our developer page on the topic.

  • How do you detect the handset?

    • We look at all of the incoming headers of the mobile phone to work out what phone it is, we based a lot of it around the user agent, but unfortunately due to our delightful transcoder friends in the industry, we have to add quite a bit more complexity around this as they often hide the user agent from us.

    This is the area we are quite proud of; we have spent a lot working out how to correctly weight segments of user agents to ensure that our matching algorithm is accurate, but gives you the best possible results when a new handset is released.

    We're working on a whitepaper right now to prove to you that our search algorithm is the most accurate in the market.

  • How much am I going to get charged?

    • For the first 30 days, nothing! After that it is up to you. Accounts start from $75 a month, but as your sites get busier, you may want to upgrade to our "Standard" edition. Take a look at the pricing page and compare for yourself.

  • Why isn't my key working?

    • Did you manage to copy and paste it correct? Being honest, most of our complains are because the key people are using is one digit short. All of our keys are a random 32 digit number, no special encryption here, so first of all check that your key is 32 digits long, then check to see if you are serving images and css files from the domain that registered when you signed up. We will only adapt the content from the domain you specified in your My Account page.

  • Why do you need my mobile website url?

    • Seeming as you insert the link in your site and it includes a key, we thought that you might get annoyed if someone else grabbed your key and built their mobile site with it, so the url is used to stop people from robbing your transactions.

+ Getting Started
+ Why mobileelements?
+ FAQ
+ How to build a mobile website
+ Design Considerations
+ Pricing Information