Dispatches from members of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Team
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W3C Mobile Web Initiative - what's next?
2008-05-10
by Philipp Hoschka
in Looking forward, Current state
During W3C's bi-annual member meeting, I presented a few slides on where we see the Mobile Web Initiative going in the future - copied below.
We'd be interested in your feedback, so see question at end.
Mobile: Where do we stand?
- More powerful mobile browsers/devices
- More flat rate data plans
- Mobile Web access growing: users, revenue, #conferences, ...
- See mobile access happening
MWI: Where do we stand?
- Best Practices for content that works well on mobile
- mobileOK Basic for automated testing of content
- mobileOK Basic Checker online tool and open-source library
- Ongoing
- Content Transformation Guidelines for transcoding
- API and Vocabulary for accessing device information databases
- mobileOK pro
- ...
Future Priority: Mobile Web Applications
- Why?
- More user friendly than mobile browsing (mail access, timetables, weather info, ...)
- May be easier to develop+install than traditional mobile applications (chat, social software, games ...)
- Goal: Turn Web/Ajax into delivery platform for mobile applications (as on desktop)
- Work at W3C has started
- Mobile Ajax workshop (with Open Ajax Alliance)
- Best Practices 2.0 for mobile Web applications (desktop apps unusable)
- API access to phone location, contact database, calendar, camera, ... (security workshop)
- Widgets (lots of fragmentation)
Future Priority: Mobile Web in Developing Countries
- Developing countries important area of growth for mobile industry
- Lots of mobile Web browsing already happening (BBC, ...)
- W3C work has started
Future Priority: Improving Standards Compliance and Testing
- No "dominant browser" in mobile
- Non-standards compliance even bigger problem for developers than on desktop
- W3C work has started
- Test harness simplifies testing Web specs on mobile device, 45K results collected via "crowdsourcing"
- Web compatibility test to check "difficult" feature support (ACID inspired)
But of course, the mobile community is bigger than just W3C members ...
So, where do you see the mobile Web going in the next few years?
And what do you think should be the contribution of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative?
Share your thoughts below!
Comments:
Comment from: Vadym Kramar [Visitor] 
· http://www.pbol.org
· http://www.pbol.org
Boundaries between different types of mobile devices are so uncertain at these days. Quite many devises from wrist watches till Linux/Windows-enabled desktop replacements may be considered as mobile. Just their browsers are different. It may happened that the principles that are applied today to the mobile devices may become to be valid (to some extend they are already valid) to devices with conventional browsers. But even the devices with conventional browsers may be of vast variety of types, forms, form-factors, input controls and output interfaces. For example, refrigerator control touch-panel, intelligent hose control touch-panel, in-sauna entertainment screen, LCD TV connected to HTPC or DVB reseiver – they all may be served by full-scaled Lunux PCs and have Mozilla Firefox browser installed. But how different are their controls and interfaces!
An extended user agent profile may not be sufficient enough to help in handling several content presentations available from the same URI. Even more, there may be a need to get more than one content presentation to the same user agent based on certain user preferences. For example, one may like to see in his browser a simplified GUI (let’s say pretty much similar he can see in his phone’s browser) of his online bank account rather than complicated GUI of the entire online bank portal – just by following to the same URL.
These all may remind a concept of a Virtual Home Environment – the same look and feel regardless of place, time and device particularities. At the same time these questions are closer to an activity scope of the UWA Working Group. And their Delivery Context Ontology may serve well for those purposes. Still, some work could have been done to extend the principles of MWI Working Group quite behind the mobile domain.
An extended user agent profile may not be sufficient enough to help in handling several content presentations available from the same URI. Even more, there may be a need to get more than one content presentation to the same user agent based on certain user preferences. For example, one may like to see in his browser a simplified GUI (let’s say pretty much similar he can see in his phone’s browser) of his online bank account rather than complicated GUI of the entire online bank portal – just by following to the same URL.
These all may remind a concept of a Virtual Home Environment – the same look and feel regardless of place, time and device particularities. At the same time these questions are closer to an activity scope of the UWA Working Group. And their Delivery Context Ontology may serve well for those purposes. Still, some work could have been done to extend the principles of MWI Working Group quite behind the mobile domain.
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2008-05-13 @ 11:42