More than half the people in the crowd of about 300 raised their hands. All right, now take them out, and turn them off. Darby, apparently, is no stranger to giving presentations to a technical audience. You can't serve HTML pages to phones, and even if you could it doesn't make any sense. Wireless users will want only a subset of the amount of information that web users expect from a page.
Data stored in XML format is well suited for that kind of extraction.
The aim of the course was to show how to use Java server pages to grab XML content and serve it to wireless and web users. Tiny phone screens display one card at a time, and you move through them by clicking href's to the next card. An XML processor sits between the WML gateway and the XML data server, applying the appropriate stylesheet to the data. Checking the user agent is a solution that sometimes works within the limited universe of Netscape, Microsoft IE, Opera and a handful of others. But the rising number of wireless clients makes this problematic.