Developers often complain that current browsers are bloated pieces of software, and they are.
In order to be able to deal with the jungle of Web sites out there, a desktop browser needs to be prepared to handle many things, from sloppy or outdated HTML to Java to SSL to PDFs to VRML and on and on and on. But the software that runs a cell phone or a PDA has to cut a much leaner figure, for obvious reasons. Until they invent a tiny hard drive and a much more powerful battery, handheld devices will be designed to do just a few tasks as efficiently as possible. For now, this means that many of these devices will basically only be able to access content that has been formatted specifically for that device, or at least for the same general type of device. However, it will still be necessary to format content for specific types of devices.