Be mobile friendly with the new W3C Mobile Checker

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As the Web has grown to adapt to the various constraints and opportunities of mobile devices, it has also become harder and more expensive for web developers to check the mobile friendliness of their web apps and web pages. Since the Web is increasingly accessed from mobile devices, we thought it essential to find a way to help developers improve the user experience of Web apps on mobile devices.

A few months ago, we started to design and build an additional tool in our long history of providing free and open-source validators. Our goal is to guide developers through the maze that the Web on mobile is, and give them enough flexibility to evolve at the same pace as the mobile web does.

Today, I am excited to announce the alpha release of our new project: the Mobile Checker.

The Mobile Checker emulates a mobile browser when checking a Web page and builds a report of possible issues, completed by tips and links to helpful resources. The project is aimed at providing web developers with a helpful partner in their development for mobile devices.

The Mobile Checker is still in active development. This alpha release comes with the following features:

- Analyze page as interpreted by a mobile browser in 3 different device profiles (2 phones, 1 tablet) - Generate a screenshot of your web page as displayed on a mobile device - Network analysis: number of requests, usage of compression, superfluous redirects, HTTP errors, opportunities for images optimization - Responsive design: valid usage of <meta viewport>, detection of horizontal scrolling - Interoperability: consistent cross-browser usage of CSS vendor prefix, Flash detection - Interactions: detection of modal dialogs

The Mobile Checker is developed as an open source project, for web developers and we hope, by web developers (yes, we're looking at you!). The service is written mostly in JavaScript (running on node.js), which we hope will make it easier for more developers to get involved. Because developers know best the hurdles of creating great user experiences on mobile, we would love to get many contributions and feedback to make the tool more useful to more people.

We already have plenty of ideas for additional improvements to the tool, but are short on development resources: let's make it awesome, together.

Access to the alpha release here: https://validator.w3.org/mobile-alpha/

Get in touch: Join us on irc: irc://irc.w3.org:6667/#dev Report a bug and open an issue, send feedback or a feature request on Github. Contribute to the Mobile Checker by first reading the contribution guidelines.

Cheers,

Guillaume

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