Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published yesterday a fourth Last Call Working Draft of its mobileOK Basic.

The document was previously published as a Candidate Recommendation. In terms of W3C Process, this means we moved backwards on the Recommendation track. The reason for this if that the changes introduced in the latest version, that reflect a few bugs/imprecisions encountered during the implementation phase of mobileOK Basic, are considered substantive, because some Web pages that previously were mobileOK Basic may not be mobileOK Basic anymore.

What were the changes and why were they needed?

1. The validation against the declared DOCTYPE is now restricted to known XHTML versions, namely XHTML Basic (1.0 and 1.1) and XHTML-MP (1.0, 1.1 and 1.2)
   In previous versions of the document, a Web page was checked twice: against its declared DOCTYPE, and against the XHTML Basic 1.1 or the XHTML-MP 1.2 DTD. The first validation - although clearly a good practice - introduces a lot of complexity when one is to implement a mobileOK Basic checker (typically, validation to HTML 4.01 cannot be done with an XML parser). Besides, what really matters as far as mobileOK Basic is concerned is whether the page validates against the XHTML Basic 1.1 or the XHTML-MP 1.2 DTD.
   The reason why the page is still validated against the declared DTD when it's one of the older versions of the XHTML Basic or the XHTML-MP DTD is because a page may validate against the XHTML Basic 1.1 DTD for instance but not against the XHTML Basic 1.0 DTD (e.g the target attribute of the a element was not supported in XHTML Basic 1.0) and it would be wrong to mark such a page as mobileOK.
   
2. The object elements are now correctly handled in the following tests: 3.6 EXTERNAL_RESOURCES, 3.15 OBJECTS_OR_SCRIPT and 3.16 PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT
   Objects may in particular be declared without type attribute. In that case, the user agent has to fetch the resource simply to determine if its type is supported or not. These kind of objects were not counted when computing the size of the page, which meant that a page that declared a 20Mb object that had to be downloaded by the user agent could be mobileOK Basic!
   
3. The definition of the mobileOK User-Agent string was relaxed to allow checkers implementations to complete the string with additional tokens and comments.
   The previous document stated that the User-Agent string had to be exactly:
   User-Agent: W3C-mobileOK/DDC-1.0 (see http://www.w3.org/2006/07/mobileok-ddc)
   A possible implementation of a mobileOK checker could be a mobileOK crawler. Although that's not a mandatory requirement, crawlers typically use the User-Agent to advertise their name and usually include a comment with a link to a "more info" page, so that servers that receive such a request can easily tell why they received it. There was no reason to prevent that, and the rule was thus relaxed to state that the User-Agent string has to start with the above string.

Comments on the Working Draft should be submitted to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org public mailing-list (publicly archived)

The end of the review period is 30 June 2008, at which time, provided no further substantive changes are required, the Working Group expects to move the document forward to Proposed Recommendation as it believes the entrance criteria for that phase will be met (see the implementation report)