Using text images and fonts
This is a controversial subject, and certainly one of the most abused techniques on the Web. If you place text in images, it is difficult to edit and impossible to find in a search. However, it can come in handy if you want to decorate a page with a title in a font that HTML does not support.

If you do choose to place text in an image, you will generally want to use a typeface that was designed specifically for computer screens. There are several excellent 1-bit friendly fonts from which to choose. Verdana, a new font commissioned by Microsoft, was designed to render well on bit-mapped displays at all resolutions. This naturally makes it suitable for use on small machines. One of the best screen faces available is the venerable Geneva font, which now serves as one of the standard fonts on certain handheld devices. The more recent Mac typeface, Espy Sans, used in MacOS 8, is more elegant and stylized than its predecessors, but it is less compact than Geneva, so it is often not as suitable for use on handheld screens.

Now, as a savvy Palm user, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, there are only a few, pre-defined fonts on my device." Out of the box, that's true. But in Palm OS 3.0, it is possible to download custom fonts to your device. You'd go through a conversion process that's out of the scope of this article, but it is possible to get your favorite fonts (or a few of them, anyway) into your favorite handheld.

In a corporate situation, where you control the devices of all your readers, you could then define your downloadable Web pages so that they used such a custom font -- since AvantGo will detect and use a custom-specified font, if available. Of course, you'd have to be sure that all the readers had installed their own custom fonts -- or your system admin team had done it for them.

In practice, it's probably a bit easier to rein in your designers and use the standard fonts that come on the device.

Dynamically generated HTML
Pages created "on the fly" by a Web server are invaluable for executive summary reports, corporate directory listings, manufacturing operations reports, HR information and a myriad of other information important to mobile computing professionals. Dynamically generated pages are often created by an application communicating with server side databases, processes or operating systems to display dynamic content. When utilizing dynamically generated HTML with AvantGo software, the process of creating the HTML should, in general, occur on the server. The server-side process can be implemented with any server-side language or tool (e.g. CGI, Java, JavaScript, Frontier, Perl, WebObjects, etc.) with the output of that process being HTML which can be rendered by the AvantGo Client. The creation of these HTML pages occurs at device synchronization time at which point the AvantGo Client requests the HTTP location as part of the Channel definition (or if your handheld device is dialed into a network, the pages can be generated when the AvantGo Client is directed to open that HTTP location real-time). This process of generating content dynamically enables the transport of real-time and up-to-date (at least as of the time of last HotSync) corporate information to mobile users.