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Web of Devices

W3C is focusing on technologies to enable Web access anywhere, anytime, using any device. This includes Web access from mobile phones and other mobile devices as well as use of Web technology in consumer electronics, printers, interactive television, and even automobiles.

Mobile Web Header link

W3C promotes “One Web” that is available on any device. W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative helps ensure the best user experience on mobile devices, taking into account device capabilities, location, and other context information.

Voice Browsing Header link

The W3C Speech Interface Framework is a suite of specifications (e.g. VoiceXML) integrating Web technology and speech interaction. VoiceXML, PLS, SISR, SRGS, SCXML, and CCXML all contribute to the Speech Interface Framework.

Device Independence and Content Adaptation Header link

Devices come in many shapes, capabilities and sizes which define constraints on the content these devices can handle. Device descriptions, content transformation guidelines, device APIs and CC/PP help developers to optimize the user experience.

Multimodal Access Header link

Increasingly, interactions with devices doesn’t only happen with a keyboard, but also through voice, touch and gestures. The W3C Multimodal architecture and its components (EMMA, InkML) allow developers to adapt applications to new interaction modes.

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The Pythia casts mobileOK spells

18 November 2009

from MWI Team Blog

Web authoring tools ease publication process. Simplicity comes with some loss of control over the generated content. There is hardly anything an authoring tool user may do to improve her content when the W3C mobileOK Checkerreports that pop-up windows should not be used. So what?! I do not have any of these pop-up links in mycontent!

The underlying theme can be updated, but this approach works up to a point when e.g. the post would best be split into multiple pages when delivered on mobile devices. Authoring tools that do not provide content adaptation mechanisms need to be extended to be able to serve mobile-friendly content to mobile devices.

I have been working on an open-source suite of tools written in PHP lately, named mobileOK Pythia, designed to help generate mobileOK content and more generically speaking to help adapt content to fit the properties of the requesting device. Here is a short overview of the outcome of this work. More information (including crucial information about the choice of Pythiaas a name ;)) can be found in the documentation of mobileOK Pythia.

This work is part of the MobiWeb 2.0project supported by the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).

Plug-ins for WordPress and Joomla!

WordPress and Joomla home pages with the mobileOK Pythia plug-in

From a user's point of view, the visual and hopefully useful outcome of this work is the creation of the mobileOK Pythia plug-insfor WordPressand Joomla!that make it possible to generate mobileOK content with these tools.

The plug-ins feature:

  • Device identification: based on WURFL, an open-source DDR published as an XML file, and accessed through a standard DDR Simple APIinterface.
  • Content adaptationto fit the properties of the requesting device in terms of e.g. screen size, script support, page size limit.
  • Theme switching: possibility to switch to a more mobile-friendly theme when the requesting device is identified as mobile.
  • POWDER: a machine-readable mobileOK claim for the Web site can be automatically created and served using a POWDER document. The POWDER document is made discoverable through the addition of a LinkHTTP header field as decribed in the POWDER Primer.
  • W3C mobileOK Checker link: a link to the W3C mobileOK Checkeris added next to the authoring input form to be able to assert the mobile-friendliness of the created content while it is being written.
  • mobileOK theme: a mobileOK template may be installed with the plug-in.

The development of a third plug-in for Moodlehas started but it is still work in progress.

There exist other plug-ins that provide similar functionality (see for instance WordPress Mobile Plugin, WordPress Mobile Pack, Mobilebot 1.0or WAFL: Mobile Content Adaptation). mobileOK Pythia separates tool-specific functionalities from tool-agnostic libraries to ease porting to other tools. In particular, the plug-ins wrap the same extensible libraries:

  • AskPythia to identify and retrieve the properties of the requesting device.
  • TransPythia to adapt content based on the properties of the requesting device.

AskPythia

AskPythia is an open-source conforming implementation of the Device Description Repository Simple APIin PHP. It is not a DDR but a wrapperto existing DDRs.

AskPythia ships with an implementation on top of the WURFL database that maps WURFL capabilities to properties defined in the Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary standard. Support for other DDRs is welcome!

Check AskPythia's documentationfor more information.

TransPythia

TransPythia is a transcoding library that adapts content (HTML, CSS, images) based on the capabilities of the requesting device. The library ships with a set of transcoding actions that are particularly adapted to mobile devices and that may be extended as needed.

Main transformations are:

  • Images conversion and adaptation: adapts images to match the requesting device's list of supported image formats and to fit the screen size. Removes images that cannot be converted or that are still too big for mobile consumption after conversion.
  • Pagination: a generic pagination algorithm that may be used to paginate HTML pages or HTML fragments when the requesting device is identified as a mobile device.
  • Tables linearization: to remove nested tables and linearize tables when the requesting device does not support them.

Check TransPythia's documentationfor more information.

Feedback

If you would like to comment, contribute, report bugs or simply tell us what you think, you are very welcome! Feel free to send an email to the public-mobile-dev@w3.orgmailing-list (with public archives).

First Draft of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap Published

17 November 2009

from W3C Mobile Web Initiative

The Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group, part of the Mobile Web Initiative, has published a Group Note of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap. This document describes some of the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones. It suggests the most promising directions for lowering barriers to developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.

Automated testing of a browser engine

10 November 2009

from Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group blog

“The cornerstone of all testing done on the core of the Opera browser is our automated regression testing system, named SPARTAN. The system consists of a central server and about 50 test machines running our 120 000 automated tests on all core reference builds. The purpose of this system is to help us discover any new bugs we introduce as early as possible, so that we can fix them beforethey cause any trouble for our users.”

Read more on the Core Concerns blog.

W3C Cheatsheet for developers

05 November 2009

from MWI Team Blog

Screenshot of the W3C Cheatsheet on a phone

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 blogto learn more about it, and send your feedback!

Public feedback solicited for Transcoding Guidelines and Mobile Web Application Best Practices

05 November 2009

from W3C Mobile Web Initiative

The review period for the two Last Call working drafts published by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Grouplast month ends tomorrow. This is a reminder that the public community is invited to review and comment the drafts:

  • The Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxiesprovides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. This version is the result of returning the document to Last Call based on public feedback received during the first review period.
  • The Mobile Web Application Best Practicesspecifies Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices.

Comments should be sent to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.orgmailing-list (with public archives). Thanks in advance!

TPAC Lightning Talk

04 November 2009

from Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity

Rotan Hanrahan will be giving a lightning talk on behalf of Sailesh Sathish at the

Technical Plenary

about Delivery Context interfaces during the first

Lightning Talks

panel. He'll be talking about

DCCI Use Cases and Requirements

.

Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies open for review

29 October 2009

from W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group's Blog

More than a year ago, we, the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, published a Last Call of a document then called Content Transformation Guidelines, and invited the community to review the document. The document provides guidance to Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content.

Many comments were received. They triggered extensive discussions within the group. Finding the right balance between allowing proxies to alter content that would otherwise not display successfully on mobile devices and reducing side-effects such proxies may have on Web applications already designed for mobile devices is no easy task! Significant changes were brought to the document as a result and another Last Call was published a couple of weeks ago under the title Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0.

We think we have addressed and replied to all the comments, providing rationale when we have not incorporated the suggested changes. We deeply thank last year's commenters, and apologize for the time it took to address the comments!

Once again, we would like to invite the community at large (and in particular mobile Web authors who are impacted by the deployment of such transcoding proxies) to review and comment the document. The Status of This Documentsection contains a list of the changes made in response to user feedback.

The Last Call review period ends on 6 November 2009. Comments should be sent to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.orgpublic mailing-list (with public archives).

HCLS F2F

27 October 2009

from Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS)

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG/Meetings/2009-11-02_F2F

The next HCLS F2F meeting is being held on November 2-3, so it's approaching rapidly. We have some excellent talks arranged. Don Doherty (Brainstage) will be giving an introduction to neuroscience, and presenting on informatics requirements. Mark Musen (Stanford) will be providing an overview of BioPortal. Peter Hendler (Kaiser Permanante) will be talking about the use of SNOMED and DL in EHRs. Helena Deus (U Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center) will speak on propagating permissions in biomedicine. We will also have Axel Polleres (DERI) presenting on the SPARQL WG, Yolanda Gil on the Provenance XG, and Eric Prud'hommeaux (W3C) on OWL2 WG, RDF2RDB WG and RIF WG. Scott Marshall (Leiden) will be giving the overview of the HCLS IG. There will also be task breakout sessions, discussions on strategic direction, outreach, collaboration, and funding.

Publication of Three Scientific Discourse Notes

23 October 2009

from Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS)

The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Groupis pleased to announce the publishing of three Interest Group notes by the Scientific Discourse Task Force:

These notes describe how one can use the Semantic Web to express and integrate scientific data from different domains and from heterogeneous services. It is hoped that they will inspire further contributions to the ongoing work of the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group and its Scientific Discourse Task Force, as well as inspire those in other domains to exploit the Semantic Web. On a related topic, the Interest Group holds a Workshop on Scientific Discoursenext monday ISWC 2009

Device APIs on the way

16 October 2009

from MWI Team Blog

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!