MWI Team Blog

I’ve been working over the past few weeks on a nifty little tool that summarizes a number of W3C technologies, including the Mobile Web Best Practices, in a mobile-friendly format, called the W3C Cheatsheet.

See my post in the W3C blog to learn more about it, and send your feedback!

Back in June, I noted that a new group that would work on Javascript APIs to access device features (such as a camera, an addressbook, a calendar, etc.) had been proposed for review to W3C Members.

Since then, not only was the group approved and started, but we even got our first publication out: a Working Group note describing the expected requirements for these device APIs.

Of course, that document may seem a bit abstract at a first glance: you'll see no API defined in there, nothing with which to play.

But if you think Device APIs are a great opportunity for the Web platform (on mobile and elsewhere), I strongly encourage you to take a look at that document and check if the requirements highlighted there match what you know you'll need from these APIs - and if they don't, please let the Working Group know!

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.

Last week, I was participating to WWW2009 in Madrid - each year, the World Wide Conference, the mother of all Web conferences, hosts a track organized and animated by W3C.

I think it was the first time that the Mobile Web got so much visibility in this conference: most (if not all) of the rather prestigious participants to the Web 20th anniversary panel mentioned the potential of the mobile web in their thoughts for the future of the Web, and more generally, the mobile web was a recurrent theme in most of the keynotes of the conference.

The other big theme was clearly around social networks, a topic close to my heart due to my involvement in the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking that led to the recent creation of the Social Web Incubator Group in W3C.

And both of these topics were at the very heart of the W3C Track in the conference - this year, the track was run as a couple of camps: one on Mobile Widgets, the other on Social Web, with clearly some overlap of interests between the two sessions.

I thought that both sessions were quite a lot of fun - I got to write my first widget in the first camp -, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to interact with all of the participants that chose to take part to that exercice! Hopefully, I'll find some time to gather and formats the notes that were taken during the various discussions groups.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference very much, and I was glad to see that the number of people that look at you like you're a madman when mentioning the usage of Web on mobile devices as important is declining very quickly...