Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

There has been a lot of discussions recently around the potential problems created by content-transformation proxies used on some networks to adapt automatically Web content to fit better on mobile devices.

This problem, particularly acute in the Mobile Web context, is almost as old as the Web itself; its impact on the Mobile Web were raised many times during the first charter of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, leading to the addition of this topic to the second charter of the group.

The group has thus now a dedicated Task Force working on this subject, and as a first step to the creation of content transformation guidelines, they've just released a first version of a Content Transformation Landscape document, where the issues and requirements surrounding content transformation are discussed and analysed.

As always, comments on the document are welcome: send them to public-bpwg-ct@w3.org, the publicly archived mailing list of the task force.

Those of us in the mobileOK Checker Taskforce, who are working to build a reference implementation of mobileOK Basic as a Java library, are pleased to announce our first alpha-quality release of the implementation. While not complete, and not without bugs, we think it's "close enough" to tell you about.

Everything is available from CVS. For your convenience, you can download a ready-to-run .jar file.

You can run it on the command-line like so:
java -jar mobileOK-Basic-RI-1.0-deploy.jar [URL]
You will get not only test results in XML format, but the intermediate "moki" XML document containing a great deal of information about the resource under test, which makes this library a sort of platform for building other kinds of tests on web content.

Comments and bug reports are welcome: contact us at public-mobileok-checker@w3.org. Thanks!