The Impacts of the Cascading Style Sheet Standard on Mobile Computing

By design, mobile computing aims to support numerous expressions of varying interfaces, contexts, and automation. Thus, as mobile computing becomes more prevalent, it is important that designers build systems in support of as many as possible unique, in-use, and user-defined characteristics. We explore these requirements and propose to support them with two existing standardized technologies: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS). Whereas we investigate the impact of the CSS standard in the context of computing in general and mobile computing in particular, we also focus on two emerging roles of this standard: device independence and usability. Our findings suggest that the application of the CSS standard can improve data delivery across independent devices with varied bandwidth and resource availability, thereby providing device independence and improved usability, respectively. We demonstrate that through their effect on device independence and usability, CSS plays an important role in the evolution, expansion, and openness of mobile computing.