WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe)

WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is a community effort focused on mobile device detection. WURFL is a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and an XML configuration file which contains information about device capabilities and features for a variety of mobile devices.

In simple, using WURFL mobile web sites and application can:

• programmatically abstract away devices differences
• avoid the need to modify applications whenever a new device ships
• avoid the need to track new devices on the market

Problem

Unlike the desktop web-channel, there is a tremendous amount of fragmentation in the mobile device-channel. Markup can be WML, HTML, HDML, XHTML Mobile Profile, etc. In addition, unlike a standard desktop web-channel, a wireless-device channel will vary on screen size, ability to support client side scripting, ability to support various image formats, and even color. Because the markup is generally sent directly to the phone, there is no opportunity for a central server to "fix" or adapt to browser limitations or defects. Software updates for mobile browsers are rare.

Solution 

WURFL solves this by allowing development of content pages using abstractions of page elements (buttons, links and textboxes for example). At run time, these are converted to the appropriate, specific markup types for each device. In addition, the developer can specify other content decisions be made at runtime based on device specific capabilities and features (which are all in the WURFL).

Download from here.

You can find C# example here.