php mobile website, need advice

i am planning to build a very simple mobile website which involves form submission and database storing, few 开发者_如何转开发years ago i have heard something called wap and wml to make these kind of webs, so i search on google for the IDE or the SDK, but it seems that all the pages regarding those is no longer available, i wonder....

anyway, what do people use nowadays to build mobile websites (because obviously, i am way left behind about this) ? if you don't mind, please provide me reading materials on how to build mobile websites today, thank you very much

what do people use nowadays to build mobile websites

HTML.

It depends,

Do you want to target high-end smartphones or older phones that only support basic HTML/CSS?

Typically most mobile websites work on a range of handsets and use HTML5 or XHTML-MP, if you need to support very old handsets you can use WML (otherwise don't bother).

WAP and WML are, as far as I'm concerned, effectively dead. Nobody uses them. It used to be the way mobile sites were built, but things have gotten much better.

These days your best bet is just to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You don't want to build a full desktop-style site though, you still want to build for low bandwidth consumption. Part of the issue is which platforms your are targeting. If you only care about iPhones, then it's really simple. You can build an test in Mobile Safari and be done with it. If you register for the Apple Developer Program, and download the XCode bundle, it includes a Mobile Safari emulator.

It's pretty easy to also support Android phones, as they use a very similar browser (Chrome/WebKit). It gets trickier when you want to include Blackberry or Windows Phone. Blackberry prior to OS version 6 has a terrible browser, which can only handle basic HTML, and limited or no CSS and JS. At this time I'm not aware of what the capabilities are on Windows Phone 7.

There are some JavaScript frameworks around that will help you add features to mobile sites via progressive enhancement, and they help you work with touchscreen events. Google for Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile.

People tend to build mobile websites the same way they build standard websites: HTML, CSS, JS. See this article for a more in-depth look: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/03/how-to-build-a-mobile-website/

If targeting high-end devices (iPhone, Android, iPad), you'd need to just get to know the browser application for those handhelds. Apple has lots of documentation on presenting web content for the iOS devices, and how to communicate different preferences to the browser (like should the page be able to be pinch-zoomed, or what image should be used for a shortcut icon if the user wants to save it to their springpad (larger image than a favicon)), like this guide for preparing content for the iPad.