Late November 2009

CT Digital Collections - available at http://www.iconn.org/digitalcollections.aspx - will be automatically searched and included in all Find Articles search results.

By December 30, 2009

Gale will:

• provide keyword-in-context text snippets along with search results for all article search results
• change the color of records in a search results list after the records have been viewed
• make it easier for mobile devices to access iCONN content with full functionality*
• enable users to send search results via SMS (Short Message Service) to a user's cell phone

* "Gale supports the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. We also support the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). WAP 2.0 is the current version of the standard. One of the major goals of WAP 2.0 was to bring mobile devices closer to the desktop by adopting the following changes:

• Support for the standard Internet communication protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP rather than the proprietary protocols used by WAP 1.0.
• Adoption of XHTML-MP as the primary markup language.

Mobile devices throughout the world vary in how they render content. This resembles the differences between Netscape and Internet Explorer in the late '90s or even Firefox and Internet Explorer today. However, the mobile device space is more fragmented: instead of having a few major mobile browsers, there are many different many browser types and thousands of variants.

The good news is that of all the various browsers, many are simply variations of a previous version. The inconsistency between the browsers is often minimal and not worth the effort to work around.

The bad news is that this problem is not likely to disappear any time soon. For as long as software comes built-in the device from its manufacturer, it's difficult to upgrade. This is especially true for lower-end phones that do not normally allow you to update the built-in applications. The resulting rendering inconsistencies will likely continue as an annoyance for years to come.

That said, this situation will improve as time passes, just as it did with desktop browsers. With increasing adoption, mobile browser developers will continue to improve their browsers, helping stabilize the situation. Furthermore, there is now a broad consensus on the Web standards that should be supported by mobile browsers and support for this baseline set of standards is improving all of the time."