Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published yesterday the Proposed Recommendation of W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0.

The document already has a long history of publications at less mature levels on the W3C Recommendation track. Publication as a Proposed Recommendation means the document is stable, and that, pending any formal objections from W3C Members, the Working Group expects it to be published as a final W3C Recommendation by the end of the year.

Publication as a Proposed Recommendation also means that there exist implementations of the specification. In the case of mobileOK, some relevant implementations are the open-source Java library of a mobileOK Checker is mostly complete (pending a minor change on SSL certificates before we officially publish version 1.0), and a list of mainstream web sites are mobileOK. Even more importantly, the working group is happy to report that some authoring tools are also known to generate mobileOK content! See the implementation report for details.

The new document contains a few editorial changes, mostly triggered by the Working Group's experience while developing the library:

1. SSL certificates checks were adjusted and moved to a dedicated HTTPS section.
   Certificates were previously covered in the HTTP Response part, but the validation of such certificates technically occurs before any HTTP message is exchanged.
2. Handling of HTTP errors was adjusted in the HTTP Response section.
   When an object element is used, the content it references may be not acceptable for a device. In such a case, a request to the content may yield a 406 Not Acceptable HTTP status code. That's perfectly fine provided the object defines some fallback content that is compatible with the device. This particular case had not been taken into account in previous versions of the document.
3. The cases when an object element should be treated as an Included Resource were clarified.
   Mobile browsers handle object elements differently. Previous versions of the document mentioned being part of the ultimate representation of the resource under test but the notion was not precisely defined. The new version clarifies the intent and removes the confusing text.
4. The Object Element Processing rule was completed with a few additional warnings.
   The warnings cover the case when a resource is downloaded and tasted by a mobile browser but discarded in the end because the browser does not support the resource's format, and the case when the type attribute of the object element does not match the Content-Type of the retrieved resource.
5. The STYLE_SHEETS_USE test was simplified.
   Some of the warnings previously defined were duplicates.