The Web on the Move

Overview

• What is W3C?
• State of the Mobile Web
• Mobile Web Initiative
• Perspectives

What is W3C ?

• Founded by Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor
• Mission: Lead the Web to its Full Potential
• Industry consortium
• About 400 members (3, Alcatel, AT&T, BT Labs, DaimlerChrysler, Ericsson, France Telecom, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Siemens, TIM, T-Mobile, Vodafone,...)

International Web Standards Organization

W3C's expanding international basis of operations(map)

• 3 Hosts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology | European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics | Keio University
• 15 W3C offices world-wide - newest: India, China

• ~65 vendor-neutral Technical Staff

W3C Technologies

Over 80 Web Standards (Recommendations) engineered to date(list/svg-by-yr/translations)

(Organization of work:SVG-from-RDF,PNG)

State of the Mobile Web

Emotional History of Mobile Browsing

Change: Technological Progress

Source: RusselBeattie.com

Change: Large Installed Base

• 1.1 Billion Web-capable handsets world-wide - 63% of all handsets! (Source: Informa, 2005)
• Penetration Internet-enabled phones

  	April 2004
  Japan	79%
  Other Asia	54%
  Europe	47%
  North America	37%
  Brazil	37%
  Worldwide	49%

Source: A.T. Kearny/University of Cambridge - Judge Institute of Management, July 2004

Installed Base Growing

Source: T-Mobile, modeled on Credit Suisse First Boston, Mobile Data 2004, Pyramid Research, Global Mobile Capex Handbook, August 2004

Change: Web has become Mass Medium

• on par with TV: 14 hours a week online (JupiterResearch, Jan 2006, US market)
• huge potential for mobile Web access

Change: Growing Use (1)

• Browsing is number one data packet generating service
• Especially for 3G users

Source: Nokia study, 2005

Change: Growing Use (2)

• Opera Mini
  • Two million users
  • Four million web pages per day
  • 38 to 76 GBytes of data traffic per day
• Web'n'Walk
  • 330 page views per month per user
  • 489% increase in data volume per user
  • 199% increase in data ARPU (excl. SMS)

Source: Opera, April 2006

Large Growth Potential

• 50% of web-capable phones not set up to use the Web
• 24% of web-capable phones used only once for Web access
• Total: 74% of web-capable phones not really used

(Source: Informa, 2005)

• MWI goal: Realize potential of mobile web access

Mobile Web Initiative

Timeline

• Nov 2004: W3C MWI Workshop
• May 2005: Initiative Launch
• 2Q/3Q 2006: First MWI-related Web standard finished ("Best Practices")

Who's Involved? (1)

19 Sponsors

Who's Involved? (2)

40 Working Group Participants

Industry is Cooperating

Challenge: Usability

• While commuting to work, user sees a URL on a bill-board
• "Hey -- I've just bought a snazzy new phone with access to 'the Web,' right? I'll give it a try!"
• Works for 15 minutes to figure out how to enter a URL into their phone's browser
• Seems to load something, but logos and images are so huge that it's impossible to make sense of the user interface on the small phone screen
• Tries to log in to favorite web mail system.
• "Sorry, your browser doesn't support cookies!"
• Throws phone out train window.

MWI Solution: Mobile Web Best Practices

• Audience
  • Web authors and developers
  • From one-person-shop to top-10 Web site
• Distilled existing "tips and tricks" (W3C Accessibility, iMode, Opera, Openwave, Nokia, ...)
  • No table for layout, no spacers-GIFs, no frames
  • Screen estate constraints: small top navigation, avoid large graphics
  • Scrolling should be in one direction
  • ...
• W3C standard expected in July 2006
• Next step: "mobileOK" trustmark for content

Challenge: Device Information (1)

Challenge: Device Information (2)

• Needed for content adaptation
• Handset manufacturers seem to have little economic benefit in providing data
• Commercial independent DD databases are expensive
• Open-source DD databases are buggy

MWI Solution: Shared Repository

• Should contain (based on MWI survey results)
  1. Screen dimensions
  2. Supported and preferred markup
  3. Supported and preferred image formats
  4. Size limitations
  5. Color support
  6. Other browser features
  7. Non-markup object support
• Currently moving from requirements to implementation

Perspectives

MWI Future Work

• MobileOK Validator
• Training
• Test suites
• "mobileOK" device specification
• ...

Wider-Reaching Benefits

• Accelerate Internet access in developing countries
• Toward a "Web on Everything" (Ubiquitous Web, Embedded Systems)
• And seeing the Web pop-up in all sort of places, likely and unlikely ...

It's 1996 All Over Again ...

... But Some Things Easier