MWI Team Blog
Dispatches from members of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Team
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Mobile and the Web - World Wide — 25 April 2007
Thinking about what I've been doing in recent weeks, the most appropriate title for my first blog entry on the MWI Team Blog seemed to be "Mobile and the Web - World Wide". Lots of discussions and thinking about the role of mobile Web access in areas of the world where direct W3C participation is currently lacking.
First, there was my trip to South Korea, where I had the honor to provide a keynote for the opening ceremony of the "Mobile Web 2.0 Forum". The room was packed - easily 400 to 500 people. In my talk, I explained why W3C was doing work in mobile in the first place, talked about our great collaboration with OMA in the area of mobile Web, and also spoke a little bit about fun things you can do when the work of the Ubiquitous Web Applications WG comes to fruition. Overall, a very impressive event! And it was good to see the MWI Best Practices flipcards prominently featured
Afterwards, I thought a lot about one of the conversations I had during this event: an engineer working for what seemed to be a smaller mobile browser vendor expressed his concern about the apparent change of direction in the HTML area: away from "clean" XHTML, and towards standardizing the "mess" that's already out there. That, of course, makes things harder for mobile browser vendors that up to now could rely on the comparatively simple XTHML standard, at least in the mobile space. On the other hand, he acknowledged the trend to provide "full browsers" on mobile phones as well, but didn't seem to think that this was a very satisfying solution technically.
Coming back, I had a longer conversation with one of my colleagues who noticed that mobile browser folks (and others from the mobile community) seem to be pretty absent from the current list of 300 or so members of the new HTML WG. Joining the WG is actually not that hard, even if your are not working for a W3C member company - see how to join info.
Coming back to the "world wide" theme, I'm spending time on putting together some concrete ideas on taking our work on mobile Web in Developing Countries to the next step by looking into EU funding opportunities for this area (but also in other areas).
Once the EU proposals are "in the mail", I'm off to Banff (Canada) for W3C's Advisory Council meeting - talking about Banff, if you are going to the Web conference, make sure you don't miss the 
Afterwards, I thought a lot about one of the conversations I had during this event: an engineer working for what seemed to be a smaller mobile browser vendor expressed his concern about the apparent change of direction in the HTML area: away from "clean" XHTML, and towards standardizing the "mess" that's already out there. That, of course, makes things harder for mobile browser vendors that up to now could rely on the comparatively simple XTHML standard, at least in the mobile space. On the other hand, he acknowledged the trend to provide "full browsers" on mobile phones as well, but didn't seem to think that this was a very satisfying solution technically.
Coming back, I had a longer conversation with one of my colleagues who noticed that mobile browser folks (and others from the mobile community) seem to be pretty absent from the current list of 300 or so members of the new HTML WG. Joining the WG is actually not that hard, even if your are not working for a W3C member company - see how to join info.
Coming back to the "world wide" theme, I'm spending time on putting together some concrete ideas on taking our work on mobile Web in Developing Countries to the next step by looking into EU funding opportunities for this area (but also in other areas).
Once the EU proposals are "in the mail", I'm off to Banff (Canada) for W3C's Advisory Council meeting - talking about Banff, if you are going to the Web conference, make sure you don't miss the Comments, Pingbacks:
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