The Integrated Operator: A Mobile Perspective
W3C Workshop: Mobile Web Initiative
Authors: Gabriel Guillaume, Alain Morvan, Ed Mitukiewicz,
Keith Waters, Philippe Lucas
France Telecom
18/19 November, 2004 Barcelona Spain (co-located with OMA)
Document Version 1.00
October 15th 2004
While the mobile environment currently suffers from limitations in
terms of computation, network bandwidth, fragmentation of the handset
installed base and usability constraints, the mobile Web
presents true opportunities for content providers, terminal
manufacturers and operators. The rapid growth of mobile services and
the ever-increasing adoption of Web services demand future solutions
that seamlessly transition between the variety of communication
channels. Ultimately, the best solutions will allow a single content
source tailored to all available channels, however, to date this has
proven difficult if not near impossible. This position paper offers an
operators perspective on some of the challenges, opportunities and
problems facing the Mobile Web.
Abstract
1.0 Introduction
2.0 Mobile Devices
3.0 Mobile Browsers
4.0 Content Generation
5.0 Mobile Usage
6.0 Proposals and Conclusion
7.0 References
Integrating multiple service delivery channels and improving
consistency of end-user experiences across networks and terminal
devices are increasingly critical for operators such as France
Telecom. Interoperable, standard based solutions are expected to
reduce the inherent complexities of multi-channel service authoring
and delivery. Due to ever growing availability of web services and
media rich applications, minimizing the risk of potential
fragmentation of the Web is viewed as one of the key challenges for
the providers of convergent communications offerings. To date the
realities of accessing Web content from mobile devices still leave a
lot to be desired. Mobile environment continues to be adversely
impacted by a variety of constraints that include limitations on
mobile device computing power, form factor, user interface, mobile
network coverage and bandwidth, service access and usage and, last but
not least, additional complexities of the mobile Web value chain:
- Mobile devices vary enormously and their proliferation
bred diversity and specialization. This has implications for the
consistency of user experience as the variety of user interface and
service interaction design options grows. In particular, different
graphic display capabilities (dimensions and color-depth) and
available input/output modalities (for example stylus/pen,
alphanumeric keypad and voice/audio). Adapting content to the form
factor of a specific device further complicates development of
multi-publication - "author once, publish many" -
applications. Content personalization and contextualization also
become very difficul tasks.
- Mobile browsers continue to lag behind their desktop
equivalents in terms of rendering capabilities and
performance. Furthermore, a promising idea of evolving a browser
into THE mobile user interface of the future appears to be
completely stalled due to a continued fragmentation of the browser
market and persistent interoperability problems. No one mobile
browser vendor yet managed to achieve a dominant market position and
the ongoing standardization initiatives including those under the
auspices of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) appear to be progressing
slower than expected.
- Content Generation may require server-based mediation to
transform content into a representation that could be used by a
particular device. Alternatively, the device can shape the content
itself. To date neither provide an optimal solution to "create
once, view anywhere".
- Mobile network performance remains largely unpredictable
in particular, network connectivity and the available bandwidth may
vary significantly depending on a number of factors, including the
mobile device location. This volatility creates additional
technology and operations challenges for mobile Web content and
applications developers as well as service providers.
- Mobile usage patterns confirm the - "anywhere,
anytime, anyhow" - integrated service proposition based on a
timely and efficient delivery of the right content presented the
right way at the right place and time, adapted as necessary to the
network, environmental conditions, device capabilities and user
preferences. In particular, using the best available input and
output modalities to facilitate user interaction with an application
and access to the relevant Web content in every context is critical
e.g., by combining voice and visual inputs and outputs.
- Mobile Web value chain involves a number of actors whose
roles and mutual dependencies are fairly complex. Most notably,
service providers depend on multiple, non-exclusive relationships
with content and application providers, handset vendors and software
tool vendors including browsers to differentiate themselves in the
marketplace through branded service offerings. Maintaining a
consistent - "look and feel" - of the interface has become a
key aspect of mobile service providers branding.
This position paper examines some of the above challenges,
opportunities and problems from a perspective of an integrated service
provider, with an understanding that the future mobile
Web "eco-system" could create win-win opportunities for all the
players involved. This position paper focuses on just a few
illustrative issues impacting the mobile device, browser and usage
categories outlined above.
The proliferation of mobile devices has bred a diversity of
capabilities that has had a direct impact on the consistency of user
experience. For example, different graphic display capabilities (x-y
pixels and color-depth) makes scaling and adapting content to the
constraints of a particular form factor complex. This is especially
true when considering multi-publication author once, publish
many applications.
The W3C and OMA have created recommendations to aid in determining
device capabilities. The Device Independence Group (W3C) has created
the Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profile (CC/PP) Recommendation. CC/PP specifies a RDF/XML language for
expressing capabilities. In conjunction, OMA has created a mobile
device vocabulary for CC/PP called User Agent Profiles (UAProf). The intent of CC/PP and UAProf is to
provide detailed capability information about the end device.
Unfortunately CC/PP and UAProf have a number of problems preventing a
complete solution to the device diversity issues. Device vendors
adoption of UAProfiles has at best, been poor: Profiles have been hard
to find, often invalid, or just plain incorrect.
A significant component of any operators strategy for mobile content
delivery, will involve browsing. The small form-factor of mobile
devices further focuses attention of the diminutive screen real-estate
therefore reconciling the needs of content branding and styling,
indicate a need for flexibility well beyond what is available in
recommendations embodied in [CSS].
In the beginning of the Internet, web pages were adapted to the
variety of available browsers such as Netscape, Mosaic and Internet
Explorer. Each browser - even each version of browser - had specific
interpretations of Standard (W3C) recommendations including known
bugs. As a result, the development of a service involved extensive
development time, costly QA and long times to market. With the advent
of the mobile Internet, things had not improved. In fact they
deteriorated with a proliferation of WML browser implementations to
the point where there are nearly one per device release.
The development of the W3C [XHTML] / [CSS] recommendations for the mobile web set
expectations that the problem would improve. In fact the situtation
deteriorated because XHTML/CSS had yet more combinations than [WML]. From an operator perspective, the enormous
permutations of browser implementations is one key limitationon mobile
Internet growth. For example, experience has shown that it is
extremely difficult to develop a [XHTML]
portal for only twenty devices without detailed content
adaptation solutions to fix on the fly a variety of browser
bugs. Of course, in the long term, such a content adaptation should
disappear. Subsequently, the development costs in todays mobile
web are too high, with a knock-on-effect of limited services that in
turn has a direct impact on poor adoption rates and ultimately,
diminishing revenues.
To date there are four versions of XHTML (XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1, XHTML-Basic, XHTML
2.0) and OMA has worked on a mobile profile called XHTML-MP. Compatibility between versions is
problematic and further amplified in the mobile space where XHTML-MP
is no longer compatible with versions developed by the W3C.
In an ideal world, content should be agnostic to the delivery context:
content created for the Web should be created once and shaped to fit
any device, including both desktop device and mobile devices. To this
end, the issues are the following:
- To select which content should be displayed for which device
(e.g. display a full news story on a desktop and only its title on a
mobile)
- To define what should be the layout and the presentation of a page
for a given category of device (e.g. put the menu on the right for
desktop landscape screen and on the top for portrait screen)
- To define what should be the navigation inside the service for a
given category of device (e.g. access to your bank account in one step
on a desktop and in three steps on a mobile)
- To adapt/transcode markup (e.g. publish in WML and XHTML)
There are numerous vendors solutions that cover part of these issues.
From the standardization point of view, the W3C addresses some of these
issues (see especially DIWG and CSS Media Query). However, it's still very
difficult, if not impossible, to efficiently design Web pages that can
be viewed on both desktop and mobile devices.
What follows are a couple of usage examples that highlight the nature
of tomorrow's mobile web.
Mobile Search
Mr Mobaddict is in a restaurant with friends. They argue about the
name of the painter of "The Joconde". Mr Mobaddict decides to light
up his mobile phone to access his favourite search engine and gets
the answer and closes the discussion."
This example is interesting for the following reasons: it's
difficult to achieve when the desktop and mobile web are
fragmented. In particular, a mobile adapted website dedicated to the
Joconde is "highly" unlikely to exist. Furthermore, it is
unclear how the content can be adapted for the mobile phone.
Location "push or pull?"
Location based services (LBS) can provide device location as part of
network services. Many applications can be developed where location is
constantly active: on-line tourist guides for mobile devices can
indicate where you are on a city map, future movie advertisements in
the streets (with BlueTooth/proximity detection), such that when you
are close-by, notifications are triggered on your device. There are
several implementations that can be envisioned:
- [LBS] in-network
request based with an update frequency to 10 seconds. This provides
location information on a "pull" basis (the [DOM] can be used to manage events as well as
store and retrieve properties).
- [GPS] on device
where the location update event reads the value and places it into
an XForms data instance.
Fundamentally, there are two types of request mechanisms that cannot
be resolved in the current Mobile enviroment: pushing or
pulling on events in the network; specifically, asynchronous
behavior is required to prevent blocking situations.
In order to solve the problems outlined above, three interdependent
sets of issues need to be addressed in a highly coordinated way:
- Mobile devices have a clearly defined problem because it
is important that Profiles be correct to be useful. A task is to
build tools to validate as well as verify Profiles. Failure will
ensure a lack of industry adoption.
- Mobile browsers should aim to provide "anywhere,
anytime, anyhow" solutions:
- Mobile browsers require a unified standard with detailed
implementations specifications to avoid proliferation and
fragmentation of XHTML.
- Effective test suite development - for browsers
possibly related to a "MobileWeb" trustmark. Ultimately there
should be a comprehensive test suite allowing content
providers to test browsers with specific test page content.
- Content development guidelines - that provide best practice
and well as conformance testing tools for authors. Such solutions
would be to provide any MobileWeb compliant web site may be
viewed on any other MobileWeb compliant browser.
- Content Generation
- Content must be: "Write once, display anywhere". A
sharper focus on precisely how content can be authoured and
manipulated is required.
- Check if the W3C/DIWG charter covers all the content
adaptation issues, and especially in the mobile context.
- Balance "One ubiquitous Web" vs. "one Mobile Web"
and "one Desktop Web". What are the solutions for short term,
mid-term and long-term.
France Telecom is dedicated to the concept of an Integrated
Operator. The proposals described above should be considered part of
any Mobile Web Initative. A clear danger of further mobile web
fragmentation is present by not addressing these issues.
- [CC/PP]
- "Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP):
Structure
and Vocabularies 1.0", W3C Recommendation 15th January
2004. See:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-CCPP-struct-vocab-20040115/
- [DevInd]
- W3C Device
Independence Activity. See: http://www.w3.org/2001/di/
- [DOM]
- W3C Document Object
Model (DOM) Technical Reports. See:
http://www.w3.org/DOM/DOMTR
- [LIF]
- "Location
Interoperability Forum, Mobile Location Protocol Specification
Version 3.2.0", OMA-LIF-MLP-V3.2.0 Specification,
LOC, 26 November 2003. See:
http://www.openmobilealliance.org/ftp/Public_documents/LOC/Permanent_documents/
- [CSS]
- "Cascading Style Sheets,
level 1 W3C Recommendation", REC-CSS1-19990111, 17th Dec
1996. See:http://w3c.org/TR/CSS1
- [VoiceXML]
- "Voice
Extensible
Markup Language (VoiceXML) Version 2.0", W3C Recommendation
16 March 2004. See: http://w3c.org/TR/2004/REC-voicexml20-20040316/
- [InkML]
- "Requirements for the
Ink Markup Language
", W3C Note 22 January 2003. See:
http://w3c.org/TR/inkreqs/
- [XHTML]
- " XHTML 1.0 The
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition). A Reformulation
of HTML 4 in XML 1.0", 26 January 2000, revised 1 August
2002. See:http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
- [CSS Media Queries]
- " Media
Queries",W3C Candidate Recommendation 8 July 2002
- [WML]
- " WAP
Forum Ltd. ", 11 June 2002
2002. See: http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm
- [cHTML]
- " Compact
HTML for Small Information Appliances", W3C NOTE
09-Feb-1998.
- [HTML]
- " HTML 4.01
Specification", W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999.
- [SE]
- "System
and Environment Framework
W3C Working Draft 28 July 2004", System and Environment
Framework: GPS resolved code I &II
- [XHTML Basic]
- "XHTML
Basic W3C Recommendation",W3C Recommendation 19 December 2000
- [XHTML-MP]
- "OpenMobile Alliance", BAC/MAE 2004
- [XHTML 2.0]
- "XHTML
2.0 ",W3C Working Draft 22 July 2004
- [RDF]
- "RDF
Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema W3C
Recommendation 10 February 2004", System and Environment
Framework W3C Working Draft 28 July 2004
- [UAPROF]
- "WAP-174: UAProf User Agent Profiling Specification
(1999)", as amended by WAP-174_100 user Agent Profiling
Specification Information Note (2001) Wireless Application Protocol
Forum. See: http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical_1_2.htm