W3C Aggregated Blogs

Just discovered - Francois explaining Mobile Web Best Practices, MobileOK and the checker at W3C's booth at this years Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM) in Barcelona.

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
  
  • Bango Analytics live
  • Admob Live display of
    mobile ad requests

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
  
  • google.com
  • Wikipedia
  • Cebit
  • Tagesschau
  • ...
• 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: 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!

A paragraph about Firefox support for IRIs was updated. For a detailed list of changes read the full post.

Read more! »

Thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann the FAQ-based article "Character encodings for beginners" has now been translated into German (language negotiated). [search key: qa-what-is-encoding]

In an new report, the audience measurement company Nielsen (known for their TV "Nielsen ratings") reports that for many "leading Internet sites", an average of 13% of users access the site only from their mobile device (data appears to be for the US for Q4 2007).

Mobile-only use varies by category of the site - here is the percentage of mobile-only users per category:

1. Weather: 22%
2. Entertainment: 22%
3. Games: 15%
4. Music: 15%
5. Email: 11%
6. Sports: 10%
7. Business/Finance: 4%
8. Social Networking: 3%
9. Search: 2%
10. Shopping/Auctions: 1%