In a perfect world, all websites would be written in a platform-independent fashion and work on all browsers by default. In reality, not that many worthwhile websites are close to usable on low-end mobile phones.
The obvious solution is for mobiles to get a bit more juice and better screen. This is happening already, at least in the rich parts of the world.
The idea in the late 1990s was to make a new Internet framework and a new markup language just for mobile phones. There were a number of problems with this. I'll talk about the three most-relevant only, you can comment on more if you want.
WAP - adoption was stymied by high-prices and slow connections
The biggest problem was the mobile phone companies charged a huge amount of money to those who attempted to use it. When your screen is 20 characters wide and each page takes half a minute to arrive, charging phone-call type rates (20p per minute at the time) was ridiculous.
So the framework was called 'WAP', which turned out to mean "Wait And Pay".
WAP - adoption was thwarted by dodgy browsers
The second problem was that the browsers in the phones were totally unusable unless you had the patience of Mother Theresa. The browsers did not cache the pages, which meant every time you went back, you had to download the page again - another 30 seconds of your life down the drain.
This was particularly painful as going back and forward was the only method of navigation. The browsers also had really bad user interfaces - even though mobile phones have at least 9 free buttons, many only offering up, down and a menu. So to click a link (such as 'next'), you had to open the menu and scroll down to "Open URL". It was as if no one expected them to take off, so they only spent half a day on them.
Developing pages for them was a nightmare. Many phones at the time, including the one I owned, had an arbitrary page size limit of one kilobyte, yes 1kb, any page larger than that (even by a few bytes) was rejected by the browser.
WML lacked hypertextuality
The third problem was that although the PC-based web had a nice easy little markup language with its own metaphors that everyone knew already (HTML); they decided to make a new language (WML) with a new set of metaphors; whomever came up with 'decks' and 'cards' should be sent to the Hague and shot on arrival for crimes against humanity.
Most WML seemed to be like powerpoint presentations, you could click next or you could click next. While, the success of the PC-WWW was based on spontaneity, a tangled web that could lead you in lots of interesting directions; WML-based sites wanted to drag you painfully up a set treadmill.
Mobile phone companies wanted a piece of the Internet action but they did not really understand the web, they based everything around big companies pushing content at you. This was happening at the same time that mailing lists, discussion forums, blogs and other peer-to-peer forms of content delivery were driving the PC-WWW forward at an amazing pace.
In the UK at least, each phone company had its own 'portal', which on some phones was near to impossible to escape. Even worse, most of the features of my set portal (Vodafone) required a montly subscription that had to be obtained through the PC-Web.
In a pizza restaurant in 1982, a civil servant called Matti Makkonen sent a 'simple message' to a colleague. By the year 2000, Makkonen's SMS was still the only real peer-to-peer application avaliable on a mobile phone.
New ways forward
Well simple WAP sites died in the late 1990s, the only decent one I remember was the BBC. In a future post I will talk about some more modern attempts to bring the Web to mobile phones.
Let me know using the comments if you used WAP sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s? How did you find them? Do you in fact love them and use them regulary?