MWI Team Blog

Version 1.2 of the W3C mobileOK Checker, released on Tuesday, helps Web authors focus on the failures that most affect the mobile-friendliness of their content, and returns the POWDER document Web authors may use as the basis of a mobileOK^® conformance claim.

Expandable sections

The reports returned by the mobileOK Checker can be long. That's not a bad thing, failure points need to be clarified. That said, scrolling over a long list of details is a tedious process and does not reveal the big picture. The new version adds unobtrusive (as in "works fine when Javascript is not enabled") Javascript to hide/show details. Details are hidden by default, simply click on a failure message to reveal its details!

Severity levels

A missing width attribute on an img element? That's a failure. Using frames? That's a failure. Obviously, the former case only slightly affects the mobile-friendliness of the page, while some mobile browsers won't even be able to render the page in the latter case. And yet both failures looked alike in the report, leaving the difficult task to evaluate the impact of a failure on the overall mobile-friendliness of the page to the reader.

Each failure now comes with a severity level:

• critical: such failures typically prevent the rendering of at least part of the page on most mobile devices! Critical errors are highlighted using a yellow background.
• severe: while such failures usually do not prevent the rendering of the page, they strongly impact the user experience.
• medium: some mobile constraints are not appropriately taken into account, e.g. the browser needs to retrieve more data than actually needed to render the Web page.
• low: useful improvements are possible.

Web authors who only have limited time available to fix failures may want to focus on the most severe failures first. The "Where to start..." section near the top of the report lists the top 3 failures to address right away.

Sprinkle POWDER on your mobileOK content

So your content is mobileOK? Congratulations! You may now wish to identify your content as mobileOK conformant. The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group recently published the W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0 note. It provides an overview of the mobileOK scheme and explains in particular how to claim mobileOK conformance.

One way to make such a claim is to use POWDER. When the page is mobileOK, the mobileOK Checker now returns a POWDER document you may use to advertise that the page is mobileOK^®. For instance, the mobileOK checker returns the following POWDER document when http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ is checked:

For more information on POWDER, please refer to the POWDER Primer.

... and more!

A few other features compose this summer release, such as the size of each resource that composes the page, or the repartition of points lost per severity level. The complete change log is detailed in the What's new? page.

Feedback welcome!

Last week, W3C started the formal process to start a new Working Group that would focus on the development of client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, Camera, etc.

If the group's creation is approved, this means that in a year or two, Web developers should have a bunch of new standard APIs to make their Web applications even more compelling and integrated with their hosting platforms; on mobile devices, this would make the Web platform an even stiffer competitor to the existing development platforms.

Stay tuned - we should know more about whether this group will go ahead in a few weeks.

The XHTML2 Working Group has just released a Proposed Edited Recommendation of XHTML Basic 1.1, which proposes to add the lang attribute to XHTML Basic 1.1, making it easier to integrate it with existing browsers assistive technologies tools.

It would also have the specific impact on making the compatibility between mobileOK and XHTML 1.0 much easier to achieve, since one of the most frequent problem in making an XHTML 1.0 site mobileOK is the usage of the lang attribute.