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Adaptation is defined by the W3C Working Group on Device Independence Principles as follows:

Adaptation is a process of selection, generation or modification that produces one or more perceivable units in response to a requested uniform resource identifier in a given delivery context. Adaptation when it occurs at the server is known as server-side adaptation. However, it may also occur at intermediate points in the delivery chain, or at the client (known as client-side adaptation).

In other words if a visitor accesses a single URI (uniform resource identifier), then the content received may have been adapted to give a satisfactory user experience.

The same word, Adaptation, has been used by others for other processes that may give a satisfactory user experience when the particular URI is accessed. For example, Luca Passani, the creator of Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, uses Adaptation to mean that the visitor will be redirected to a different URI appropriate to the user’s device. The following is taken from his Introduction

A short explanation of adaptation first: imagine you have an application that displays pictures on mobile phones. Also imagine that all the devices you need to support have screen-widths between 120 and 145 pixel. So you create pictures which are not larger than 120 pixels. All devices will read it without distortion (even though some devices will get some extra white space at the sides).

That is until the day when some new cool device with a screen of 320 pixel width is introduced on the market and a 120 pixel wide “stamp” in the middle of the screen is no longer satisfactory. If you analyse the HTTP headers of any request to your service, you can recognize requests from a 320-pixel device and provide a larger version of the picture to that device. Congratulations. You have just discovered “adaptation”. You are effectively adapting mobile content to the capability of that device.

A simpler example of adaptation could be one where you manage to programmatically tell XHTML-MP devices from legacy WML devices and you redirect requests to one of two mobile sites: WML and XHTML-MP.

This use of adaptation is not the same as the W3C definition. To help people better understand the concepts, a different term may be helpful. The word, ‘Alternation‘, seems appropriate. The following definition in this context has affinities with how the word alternation is used in other contexts.

Alternation is a process whereby users seeking a certain content are redirected to a URI appropriate to their device.

In other words alternative URIs are created so as to provide optimal user experiences for different devices. In practice there are now a large number of websites that are offering alternative URIs for different devices with no clear word to describe that process. Alternation is a suitable descriptor.

Associated Concepts:
URI << One Web << Adaptation Or Alternation >> Multi-Web >> AGI