Edit comment LC-1719 for Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group

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Comment LC-1719: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Ben Cerbera Millard <cerbera@projectcerbera.com>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Resolution status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
> The draft is premised on a vision about mobile browsing that assumes
> special mobile content. Instead of implying a separate Mobile Web, I
> think the W3C should push for one World Wide Web with mobile browsers
> that can access general Web content.
> [...]
> The premise of mobileOK seems to be that you take the non-Web-ready thin
> browser and expect origin servers out there take special steps to
> accommodate it.

This is a fundamental criticism I have of the mobileOK guidelines. Mobile
phone networks here in the UK have been promoting their "access the whole
Web on your phone" capabilities for years. They can even do scripting [1].

Because so much web content is text/html, surely it is more useful to work
on improving support for that in UAs? Mainstream mobile UAs already have
better support for HTML than XHTML, many having no support at all for XHTML
[2]. I can browse the text/html Web fine on my mobile phone in the
here-and-now.

PDF and Word documents are also more common than XML formats on the web, in
my experience. Improving support for them would surely be the next logical
priority after HTML?

Advising against W3C technologies such as HTML and PNG seems like a strange
move for a W3C Working Group to take. Especially since these technologies
are already implemented widely.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: The reason the recommendation talks about XHTML Basic is not because it's XHTML, but because of the "Basic" part. XHTML Basic defines a subset of XHTML that is suitable for the mobile context (and yes here I acknowledge the debate about whether XHTML Basic should even exist). It's convenient to advocate use of this existing standard because of it's mobile-oriented nature, not because of any XML-related features. The alternative is to, I suppose, define HTML Basic, which seems unnecessary. As you note, many browsers are just parsing XHTML (Basic) as HTML anyway. > PDF and Word documents are also more common than XML formats on the web, in > my experience. Improving support for them would surely be the next logical > priority after HTML? Maybe -- the focus here is on the content side rather than user agent side. I believe user agents have matured a little faster than the content -- it's not that we're lacking decent mobile browsers but that we're lacking plenty of good, usable mobile content. Hence the focus on content rather than user agents. > Advising against W3C technologies such as HTML and PNG seems like a strange > move for a W3C Working Group to take. Especially since these technologies > are already implemented widely. Advise against HTML or PNG? nothing in the specification says this. The spec advocates XHTML Basic (Basic being the key part there, not the X) and GIF and JPEG since PNG isn't as widely supported.; Resolution: Our understanding and experience is that XHTML Basic delivered with the content type application/xhtml+xml succeeds in the largest number of cases. Our objective is not to specify improvements to mobile devices, though we hope that happens, it is to help content providers achieve a functional user expeirences on the widest range of mobile devices. We encourage content providers to work towards a harmonised experience on devices that have more advanced capabilties.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)