Talk:Introduction to mobile web

Future updates

I WANT TO CREATE AN ENTIRE NEW MOBILE COURSE, TO BE RUN INDEPENDENTLY IN ITS OWN RIGHT. I AM CURRENTLY WORKING ON THIS FOR A UNIVERSITY, BUT IT WILL BE THEN ROLLED OUT FOR ANYONE TO USE. THE ROUGH NOTES I HAVE RIGHT NOW ARE:

1. Introduction to how mobiles work, and what features they have - hardware, browsers, networks, Wifi/GPRS/3G, etc.
2. Mobile web is the same as the normal web, but with a few more constraints, and different UX requirements - brief summary of differences
3. Mobile browser constraints - it isn't just about Webkit - you also have other good browsers such as Opera Mobile, and also lots of feature phones with low spec browsers to consider. Also Opera Mini, very popular, but a proxy browser. How does this work with your apps?
4. Mobile UX - all about context, what does the user want to do in this context, how does it differ from the desktop, etc.?
5. Making an app or site mobile friendly - do you create a different site, or do you adapt your existing site for mobile?
6. Adaptive design - graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, using media queries and viewport to adapt layout, using feature detection to server appropriate content and services, NOT browser sniffing!
7. Optimising for mobile - JS optimisation, size matters
8. Accessibility for mobile - a lot of accessibility best practices come into their own on mobile, eg providing a transcript for a video can be great when you are in a noisy environment such as a pub full of football fans and can't hear the video, or if you haven't got the bandwidth to download the video at all
9. Important new technologies for mobile - Geolocation API, Offline apps (web storage, AppCache, WebSQL), HTML5 video
10. Tapping into physical device features - WAC

About the original author

Brian Suda is an informatician currently residing in Reykjavík, Iceland. He has spent a good portion of each day connected to Internet after discovering it back in the mid-1990s. Most recently, he has been focusing on the mobile space - how smaller devices will augment our every day life and what that means to the way we live, work and are entertained. His own little patch of Internet can be found at suda.co.uk where many of his past projects and crazy ideas can be found.