Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group Blog

In the last few months the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group have been not secretly meeting every Tuesday, discussing, among other things, an update to the Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers. As the inputmode attribute is no longer part of the HTML5 specification, we need to replace our test on this with something else..

The last couple of months we have been investigating a replacement test around HTTPS/SSL and perhaps the Online Certificate Status Protocol. Different mobile devices can have different SSL trust roots installed (which often aren't viewable) and this security fragmentation could lead to a poor user experience. Or worse, Web developers fear to use SSL at all for this very reason.

SSL has always been a complex area and the current participants of this workgroup are not necessarily experts in the area. Perhaps you dear reader are? That didn't stop Opera's Wilhelm shooting SSL a parting shot with:

SSL is not establishing a hierarchy of trust, but a hierarchy of whom to blame.

So we are still looking for a new test for the famous Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers. Currently we have proposals to look into:

1. Timers
2. MathML via CSS
3. A Javascript test from a well known framework

You could participate by either reading the meeting minutes, joining the call, hanging out on the #mwts channel on W3C IRC (irc.w3.org:6665), mailing the mwts mailing list or commenting on the blog. Or all of the above! Your feedback, ideas and participation are very welcome.