Can your site be viewed on a mobile phone?

Today the BBC are running an article on the Future of the Internet in 2020. The article seems to be completely unoriginal, I've heard everything before, but it made me think, how does this site actually look on a mobile phone. I don't have any special plugins installed to convert code to WML, and I don't have a separate wap site, so essentially the way my site appears in any standard desktop browser is going to be how it appears on a mobile phone. Obviously this poses probles given the screen size of your typical mobile phone.

Anyway, I came across mobile phone emulator which uses your regular browser and some javascript to to emulate how a site looks on the screen of a Nokia N70, or Sony K750. I have no idea how popular these phones are but I do know I've seen a lot of ad's for them both recently and big budget marketing campaigns in the mobile phone world usually translate into big user base.

Anyway, the interesting thing seems to be that any css-only content first site (like this site) actually presents quite well. I also tested the Serendipity blog (coded by me) which includes a text only navbar at the top of the screen, and this worked as expected, although the footer info shows up before the entry. This isn't too much of a problem but should be possible to change using css. I haven't conducted a rigorous investigation, although I did check a couple of other blogs and several couldn't be displayed. Looking at their sourcecode they include additional javascript, or the page is structured using tables, or they include poorly written HTML. This quick test proves to me that I need to do something about my own site to improve its usability for mobile phone browsers, but at least I know my site visitors can use their mobile phone..

I guess I need to learn about the different browsers available, and probably about the reduced XHTML used by modern mobile phones. Updating my templates to handle the reduced XHTML used by these devices should be a no-brainer once I understand which tags and styles are not supported.