MWI Team Blog

Generating Web sites that provide a good user experience on desktops is tricky. Add a few mobile constraints (smaller screen size, limited memory, limited bandwidth, lots of distinct mobile devices) and the task becomes impossible but for a few mobile experts, leaving the vast majority of Web content authors wish there was some easy way to make their content available on mobile devices without having to think too much about it.

There is! The mobileOK mark was developed by the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group to make Web content authoring that takes mobile constraints into account one click away from "regular" Web content authoring. With the publication of the W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification as a final W3C Recommendation, the Version 1.0 of the online W3C mobileOK Checker tool was released yesterday to help make that dream come true.

The new version features a number of improvements, including:

• New view per category: reports follow a hierarchical pattern that best matches the usual areas authors address while generating content: Structure of the page, Style sheets, Images, Links, ...
• Clearer messages: highly technical tests returned highly technical messages. The new messages are intended to be clear for everyone and help educate authors on mobile Web best practices where possible.
• Score: a bit not mobileOK or far from being mobileOK? The Checker returns a score to give a sense of the level of mobile-friendliness of the content under test. Improve your content to improve your score!
• Page size and number of resources: to render a page, browsers usually need to retrieve a a bunch of resources. How many? The size and number of the different constituents of the page (e.g. images, style sheets) is now highlighted.

The W3C mobileOK Checker is based on the open-source mobileOK Checker Java library developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group.

Help the Web go mobile, use mobileOK tools, use the W3C mobileOK Checker!