Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

Why are we doing this?

It is a simple question to ask, yet the answer is elusive. I can only speak for myself in this blog and explain some of my motivations. It may explain where I hope the fruits of our labor in this group will lead us.

One quick answer would be, that if we continue as we are at the moment, the barriers and separation of a "mobile web" and "regular web" will get higher and larger. This seems counter intuitive, considering that the full potential of web lies in being mobile. More about that later. Having been involved in some of the early development of XForms I have found the work done in the W3C to be very important and learned a bit about the metaprocesses which foster, in the end, the establishment of a standard. Experience has taught me why the W3C is "only" making "recommendations" and not "standards". A standard is something which is in fact used by a whole bunch of people. This means a recommendation needs to be taken up by the public at large and implemented. Then it becomes a standard. In the web-world the industry is still reeling with impact from the browser wars. It was a process which has damaged the efforts of opening up the web as a global instrument in a great fashion. The result is, some companies dominate market segments and users which are to this day faced with few choices and non-compatible proprietary technologies. Interestingly enough in the web world even the industry is waking to the dogma that standardization will save money and allow them to focus on something that really sells - value, quality and service. In other words, by not having to worry so much about /*how*/ you implement something, you can worry about /*what*/ you are implementing. The mobile world is still stuck in a phase were nothing is settled. Various markup languages are being implemented, network operators dictate to manufacturers what their devices should be able to do and everybody is basically trying to eek out an existence, by fighting for small advantages. As a result there are many functionalities out there looking for users. In other words, the mobile world is caught up in a feature frenzy which serves only the establishment of market share and will not, in the long run, serve to make mobile content more indistinguishable from regular web content. So why are we doing this? I hope that we can manage to come up with some guidance for those who a) simply want to offer content, if free or for payment is unimportant b) want to consume that content such that in the end, we can help all industries involved to focus on one thing only - the quality and usability of their products. This can only happen when we make the Internet portable. A portable Internet, also represented by the "one web" concept in the W3C represents no less than the "disappearance" of the web from our lives. It will disappear as the telephone has disappeared, the TV, the car. These items are so common place they /*are*/ our regular life. In order to realize that vision, we need to give guidance on how to begin solving the problems that exist today, by proposing best practices. A best practice is not a standard, it is not even a recommendation. It is simply a way to work with today's methods to prepare for the future. It is important to get away from the understandable, but somewhat short sighted, focus on today's problems and think forward. If we do not think in a future-oriented fashion we will doom our work today, because our recommendations may not work tomorrow. As such we should prepare the way in a fashion which will allow the well thought-out and non-proprietary recommendations made by the W3C come to bear and enable users and industries to make the most of the Internet. Best regards, Kai