The Mobile Web Initiative

Goal

The Mobile Web Initiative's goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web

Working groups

• Mobile Web Best Practices: best practices to improve the user experience on mobile devices
• Device Description: easy access to repositories of device properties
• Test Suites: interoperability of mobile browsers
• Mobile Web for Social Development: exploring ways to bridge the digital divide
• MWI Steering Council: representatives from MWI Sponsors setting MWI directions and managing liaisons

The Web: tomorrow's development platform

• Native applications
  • Hard to develop and maintain
  • Difficult to install anything on mobile phones anyway
• Java applications
  • easier (still not easy!) to develop, hard to maintain
  • Code signing may be a nightmare
• Web Applications
  • easy to develop and maintain
  • can't access all the functionalities of the devices for the moment

There will always be a need for native/Java applications, but...

→ The Web will be the main mobile development plaform in the future!

Mobile Web Best Practices:
Why?

• Why W3C Mobile Web Best Practices?
  • Mobile Web Applications derive from...
    Mobile Web sites made of...
    Mobile Web pages
  • many different mobile browsers and devices
  • too expensive to test the user experience on all devices

  → Mobile Web pages need to rely on solid foundations.

• Why W3C Mobile Web Best Practices?
  • Mobile industry leaders agreeing on a set of well-defined best practices to improve the overall user experience on as many mobile devices as possible
  • The W3C Process ensures that the best practices were thoroughly reviewed by the W3C, its Members, and the community at large

Mobile Web Best Practices:
In short

• Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on 29 July 2008
• Set of 60 best practices to keep in mind when creating mobile content.
• Summarized in handy flipcards!
• Audience: creators of Web Sites (developers, interaction and graphic designers)

Mobile Web Best Practices:
Without BPs vs. BPs inside

A few themes and Best Practices (1/4)

A few themes and Best Practices (2/4)

A few themes and Best Practices (3/4)

A few themes and Best Practices (4/4)

Best Practices in practice:
mobileOK conformance (1/3)

What is mobileOK?

• (roughly) the set of machine testable Mobile Web Best Practices
• a trustmark that says I took mobile constraints into account
• the solid foundation to create your Mobile Web pages

mobileOK applies to an hypothetical default delivery context (DDC):
the minimum delivery context specification necessary for a reasonable experience of the Web.

Best Practices in practice:
mobileOK conformance (2/3)

Checking mobileOK conformance = running a mobileOK Checker on a page

• ready.mobi: http://ready.mobi
• Fundación CTIC TAW checker: http://validadores.tawdis.net/mobileok/en/
• W3C mobileOK Basic checker: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
  (the underlying checker is in Java and available as open-source)

Best Practices in practice:
mobileOK conformance (3/3)

Let's Run the checker on Beethoven's example

From pages to applications (1/2)

Once pages follow the Mobile Web Best Practices, how to exploit device capabilities and awareness of the delivery context to create Mobile Web Applications with a cool user experience?

• Mobile Web Application Best Practices
• The CAPABILITIES Best Practice is at the heart of the document:
  • touch screens
  • pointing devices
  • location-based awareness
  • support for more complex formats
• Work in progress

From pages to applications (2/2)

Areas being explored:

• Personalization: practical means to stop asking for credentials again and again
• Security and privacy: use HTTPS sparingly when really needed
• User awareness and control: keep users informed when an app accesses the network
• Client side storage: a possible solution to limit network access
• Conservative use of resources: compression
• User interaction and interface issues: touch screen, page updates, ...
• Handling device capability variation: Device Description Repositories

Related works within W3C (1/5)

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group is also working on:

• Content Transformation Guidelines
  
• Relationship between MWBP and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
  
• An addendum to the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 specification

Related works within W3C (2/5)

The Device Description Working Group is working on:

• DDR Core Vocabulary
• DDR Simple API

Related works within W3C (3/5)

The Test Suites Working Group is working on several test suites, among which the Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers

Related works within W3C (4/5)

• The Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group identifies the key challenges of using mobile phones as an ICT-platform in Developing regions.
  
• The MWI Steering Council:
  • sets the directions of the Mobile Web Initiative
  • watches outreach and marketing opportunities
  • manages liaisons (transversal role)

Related works within W3C (5/5)

In other working groups:

• SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics
• WICD: Web Integration Compound Document (XHTML + CSS + SVG)
• Web Security Context Working Group: baseline set of security context information that should be accessible to Web users
• Geolocation Working Group (about to be created): secure and privacy-sensitive interface for using client-side location information in location-aware Web applications

Conclusion

• Mobile Web Best Practices flipcards to design Web pages that provide a good user experience on most mobile devices
• The mobileOK checker to routinely check mobile friendliness
• Mobile Web Application Best Practices to design mobile Web apps
• Questions ? ?? ?!?

This talk is part of the MobiWeb 2.0 project supported by the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7)