About the Mobile Web Best Practices checker

The Mobile Web Best Practices checker aims at automating the verification of the compliance of a given Web page to the Mobile Web Best Practices.

As of May 2006, it implements partially the Best Practices published on April 12 2006, based on the tests given in the specification.

This is a beta release and the results of checking a page with this tool shouldn't be taken as an authoritative analysis. This service is provided on a purely experimental basis at this point.

The tool is known to be incomplete. Only the following Best Practices have been (at least partially) implemented:

1. ACCESS_KEYS (partial, needs human verification)
2. CHARACTER_ENCODING_SUPPORT
3. CHARACTER_ENCODING_USE
4. CONTENT_FORMAT_SUPPORT
5. EXTERNAL_RESOURCES (partial, needs human verification)
6. BALANCE (partial, needs human verification)
7. GRAPHICS_FOR_SPACING (partial, needs human verification)
8. IMAGE_MAPS
9. IMAGES_SPECIFY_SIZE
10. IMAGES_RESIZING
11. LINK_TARGET_FORMAT (partial, needs human verification)
12. MEASURES (partial, doesn't look at CSS yet)
13. MINIMIZE (partial, needs human judgment)
14. NON_TEXT_ALTERNATIVES (partial, needs human judgment)
15. OBJECT_OR_SCRIPTS (partial, needs human judgment)
16. PAGE_SIZE_USABLE (partial, needs human judgment)
17. PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT
18. PAGE_TITLE (partial, needs human judgment)
19. AUTO_REFRESH
20. REDIRECTION
21. POP_UPS
22. SCROLLING (partial, needs human judgment)
23. TABLES_SUPPORT
24. TABLES_NESTED
25. TABLES_LAYOUT (partial, needs human judgment)
26. VALID_MARKUP
27. STYLE_SHEETS_SUPPORT (partial, needs human judgment)
28. STYLE_SHEETS_USE
29. STRUCTURE (partial)
30. CONTROL_LABELLING (partial, needs human judgment)
31. DEFAULT_INPUT_MODE
32. AVOID_FREE_TEXT (partial, needs human judgment)
33. PROVIDE_DEFAULTS (partial, needs human judgment)
34. CACHING

The implementation of these Best Practices tests hasn't been reviewed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group yet, and so the results of the checker are purely experimental at these points.

Also, the tool is known to be slow on pages that feature a great number of links, given that it needs to analyse each of them as part of the Best Practices checking. It is expected that a future release will only check a limited number of links.

The source code of the checker is available in W3C Public CVS Repository (see instructions on using this service), and released under the W3C Software license.

Comments on the tool should be sent to public-bpwg@w3.org, the publicly archived mailing list of the Best Practices Working Group.

Known bugs

• when dereferencing linked resources, the checker doesn't compute a proper absolute URI after HTTP redirects
• the checker doesn't take into accounts fallback mechanisms for objects (i.e. it reports an error when an object calls a non supported format, even if it uses a fallback that is supported)

This work is part of the 3GWeb project, financed by the European Commission's IST Program.