Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

The W3C Director approved the publication today of the Mobile Web Best Practices as a Proposed Recommendation; during the Proposed Recommendation phase, W3C Members are invited to review and hopefully endorse the document, in order for it to be approved as a W3C Recommendation, the name W3C gives to its final standards.

While this phase typically lasts a few weeks, it may take a bit more time in our case given that we have a dependency on XHTML Basic 1.1 and that this specification isn't as advanced on the Recommendation track as ours.

Meanwhile, we're pretty proud of the work accomplished over the past months, especially given that our first public working draft was published little over a year ago.

Thanks also to all the patient commenters who helped turn this document into a richer and more useful one, and thanks to all those who contributed to our implementation report, which provided precious feedback on points that needed clarifications during our Candidate Recommendation phase!

PC Magazine reports that mobile Web usage is climbing (based on some Telephia research. So -- what are the salient points of this piece of research? First of all, people want to use the same Web sites they access from the PCs on their mobiles. Secondly, the mobile browser space is much more highly fragmented than the PC browser space. Pretty obvious stuff if you've been working in this space for a while (and both topics that we've been tackling here in the Mobile Web Best Practices group) but it's good to see more industry voices singing the same tune.

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has just released a first draft of its mobileOK document; mobileOK aims at defining a labeling system for Web content to help identify pages that were built with mobile devices in mind.

mobileOK is directly built upon the Mobile Web Best Practices: to be mobileOK, a page needs to pass a well-defined subset of the Best Practices, as assessed through a refinement of the tests developed as part of the Best Practices.

Beyond this, mobileOK is expected to use the outcome of the Web Content Label Incubator Group as a basis for building and publishing conformance claims, making it a sound basis for a a number of usage scenarios, from content certification to search engine filtering .

While this document is a very much an early draft, the Working Group is interested to get feedback on some of the issues identified in the document, in particular:

• on the choice of Best Practices belonging to the level 1 and level 2 of mobileOK
• on the inclusion of the Thematic Consistency Best Practices as part of mobileOK

Comments on the general direction of mobileOK are also very much welcome!