The widespread deployment of Web-enabled mobile devices (such as phones) make them a target of choice for content creators. Understanding their strengths and their limitations, and using technologies that fit these conditions are key to create success mobile-friendly Web content.

See also the Mobile Web Initiative pages.

What is specific to authoring for mobile devices?

Mobile Web Best Practices Flip Cards Summarize the Guidelines

Ideally, site authors would be able to meet the growing demand for a quality mobile experience without changing a line of code. But the reality is that a site designed specifically with mobility in mind will always provide a much better user experience to mobile users, even when they are equipped with the device du jour.

The reasons for that include the challenges posed by network costs and delays, memory and CPU limitations, keyboard and pointing devices differences. As importantly, they feature a growing set of advantages with their personal and always-available nature, and their increasingly context-aware capabilities.

As a result, the mobile experience often merit its own set of design considerations, as discussed in a growing body of literature, including W3C’s mobile Web authoring and device independent authoring guidelines. Mobile users operate in a very different usage context than PC users, and providing them with an experience customized to their needs is likely to be the best service to them.

What technologies have been developed to fit mobile devices?

Over the past years, W3C has developed a number of Web technologies that explicitly take into account the specificities of mobile devices:

• CSS Mobile, a profile of the cascading style sheet language that matches the need of mobile Web authors
• SVG Tiny, a profile of the Web’s scalable vector graphics format targetted at the capabilities of mobile devices
• XHTML For Mobile, which defines a subset of XHTML for mobile
• and various technologies that can be used to build mobile applications based on Web technologies

Learn more

The Mobile Web Initiative has set up a training program to help Web designers and content producers who are already familiar with the desktop world to become familiar with the Web as delivered on mobile devices.

The mobile Web developers’ corner offer links to additional useful resources for Web developers.

Current Status of Specifications

Learn more about the current status of specifications related to:

These W3C Groups are working on the related specifications: