W3C

Edit comment LC-1630 for Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group

Quick access to

Previous: LC-1635 Next: LC-1639

Comment LC-1630
:
Commenter: Bruno von Niman <ANEC_W3CRep_Bruno@vonniman.com>

or
Resolution status:

Comment #1: In the perspective of the above, we believe that this may be understood as
(strongly) misleading consumers, who will have other, natural assumptions about the
meaning of the trust mark. Assumably, if a mobile Web site is declared to be “mobileOK�?,
consumers will assume the trust mark to is some kind of guarantee for aspects that will mean
OK to them. In other words, it may well be assumed as a guarantee for reliable content, safe
access, and trustable connections with a fair usability and some minimum levels of
accessibility. Furthermore, depending on the consumer’s age, assumptions may even be
made about the some kind of appropriateness of the content, when accessed by young
children.
An analogy to the above is TV sets marketed as “HD ready�?. Even if this is only a declaration
of one of the TV set’s capabilities, consumers (typically uninterested in details of this and
other technologies) will naturally assume this to be a declaration of compatibility and
capabilities for receiving and displaying high definition TV broadcasts without further needs to
buy additional products (such as a set-top box) and most probably, subscriptions (that will
also imply a considerable monthly fee). Consumers are often not aware that HD displays will
only display an HD picture when connected to an HD receiver (set-top box).
This will lead to consumer disappointment and the product may even be handed back. To
continue with the analogy, “Real HD ready�? TV sets are now marketed and the situation is
becoming very confusing…what was “HD ready�?? And what may be next? False marketing
does not aid the successful uptake of new consumer technologies.
Therefore, we suggest the re-branding of the mobileOKâ„¢ and mobileOK Basicâ„¢ trust marks
in some way that reflects their true and proper meanings. Due to the complexity of the
required branding, this may be a challenging task but worth the effort. It is not our task, nor
competence area to propose alternative names that would work properly on a global market
but wording that consumers would understand may include:
• Ready for mobile use;
• Mobile device adapted site;
• This content displays OK on mobile devices.
We believe that third party provisioning (or certification) is the only way to provide a reliable
trust mark information to consumers as often, products do not match qualities declared by
manufacturers, entailing a loss of consumer confidence. ANEC therefore encourages third-
party certification.
ISSUE-186
(space separated ids)
(Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)


Developed and maintained by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (dom@w3.org).
$Id: 1630.html,v 1.1 2017/08/11 06:43:31 dom Exp $
Please send bug reports and request for enhancements to w3t-sys.org