Web Open Standards and the Mobile Web Initiative

July 25th 2007

MOBILIZING THE WEB -IMA TECH CONFERENCE

Tel Aviv, Israel

W3C Associate Chair, Europe
Director of International Relations and Offices

These slides: http://www.w3.org/2007/07/dd-ima.htm

W3C Exec Summary

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an International Consortium where Member and External organizations, a full-time technical staff, and the public work together to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing Web standards such as protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

Goals: Interoperability, Universality, Functionalities
Neutral/nonforprofit, consensus based, open participation, open results
~450 members, ~70 staff,
~50 Working Groups ~20 Coordination Groups and Interest Groups
Hosting: MIT (America), ERCIM (Europe) and Keio University (Japan) + 17 Offices
Advisory Board, Technical Architecture Group
Liaisons with 40+ other standards bodies, Accountable to the global Public

What Open Standards means ?

A lot of debates nowadays for a common definition of Open Standards(IGF, EC, etc)

Transparent process
Open participation
Technical Consensus
Running code
Free and Persistent Specification
W3C Patent Policy for Web Technologies

W3C Standards Track

rec track

W3C Results

W3C technologies

Goal: One Web

W3C continues to expand the reach of the Web to:

Everyone (regardless of culture, abilities, etc.),
Everything (applications and data stores, and on devices ranging from power computers with high-definition displays to mobile devices to appliances),
Everywhere (from high to low bandwidth environments),
Diverse mode of interaction (touch, pen, mouse, voice, assistive technologies, computer to computer),
Enable computers to do more useful work (through advanced data searching and sharing).

Mobile Web Initiative - MWI

Origin (2004): Convergence of goals
- W3C Goal:
  - Extend the Web and its accessibility
  - fight against walled gardens
- Mobile Players: Create a joint initiative to:
  - Increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User)
  - Open and enable a new market
Challenges
Organization and Structure of the MWI
Future work

Real Challenges!

mobiles in christmas 2005

Source: RusselBeattie.com

Challenges (2)

How to write Web content to fit with the diversity?
What are the characteristics of the phone loading my content?
Interoperability problems?
- numerous phone browsers
- numerous phone operating systems
Discoverability of mobile friendly web site?

The Mobile Web Initiative

Launched in May 2005
3 Technical Working Groups
- Best Practices Working Group
  - Mobile Web Best Practices (read the flipcards)
  - MobileOK trustmark
- Device Description Working Group
  - Improve access to device description information
  - Standard API to Device Description Repositories
- Test Suites Working Group (future: MobileOK for Software?)
Driven by the MWI Steering Council

Who's Involved?

20 Sponsors:

MWI sponsors

WG Participants: AOL, France Telecom, Google, Microsoft, mTLD, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Opera, Samsung, SK Telecom, T-Online, Telefonica, Vodafone, ...

Future Work

Workshop on Mobile Ajax, co-sponsored by W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance, is to be held 28 September in the San Francisco Bay area, USA (deadline for submitting interest/paper is 15 August)
Future work in the area of mobile Web access in developing countries is currently in the planning stage
Further plans in MWI include the establishment of a training program for Web site developers who want to develop sites that can be accessed from mobile devices.
New work on the Ubiquitous Web offers a vision of the way Web technologies might be exploited in future: its aim is to make it easier to create distributed applications that are context aware and which dynamically adapt to users, devices and the environment.
Numerous coming MWI outreach activities such as the Mobile Internet World mid November, where Tim Berners-Lee will keynote, and where we are organizing a mobile Web standards seminar.

Joining the work now

Following the MWI and participating in the public mailing-list
- MWI Home Page: http://www.w3.org/Mobile
- public-mwts@w3.org (archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-mwts/ )
- public-bpwg@w3.org (archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-bpwg/ )
- public-ddwg@w3.org (archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ddwg/ )
Becoming W3C Member and joining MWI Working Groups
- W3C Membership Information and Benefits : http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html
Becoming MWI Sponsors and driving MWI through the Steering Council

MWI Sponsor Page : http://www.w3.org/Mobile/Sponsoring