Outline

Photo by Elaine Vallet

1. The World Wide Web Consortium
2. Mobile Web Best Practices / mobileOK™
3. The W3C mobileOK Checker
4. Checker Usage
5. Future work

The W3C

Leading the Web to its full potential...

Photos by mnadi and psd

Web standards

Photo by Elaine Vallet

X(HTML), CSS, XML, SVG, PNG, WCAG, RDF, XSLT, ...
Privacy, Semantic Web, Accessibility, eGovernement, Mobile Web, ...

The Mobile Web Initiative

Making Web access from a mobile device as simple as Web access from a desktop device.
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web

• Mobile Web Best Practices
• Device Description
• Test Suites
• Mobile Web for Social Development
• MWI Steering Council

Mobile Web Best Practices - Why?

User eXperience!

Mobile Web Best Practices - Overview

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0:

• W3C standard since July 2008
• explains the usual mobile constraints: screen, keyboard, network, ...
• shows the potential of mobile devices: personal, widespread, always on, ...
• 60 best practices to keep in mind when authoring Web content.
• Summarized in handy flipcards!
• Audience: Web site authors (developers, designers, project managers, testers)

Mobile Web Best Practices - Example

The mobileOK mark

• Set of best practices that may be automatically checked
• A mark to claim I took mobile constraints into account
• Solid foundations for Web pages
• One click away with the W3C mobileOK Checker

From Best Practices to mobileOK

The W3C mobileOK Checker

http://validator.w3.org/mobile

• Validation tool
• Educational tool

Categories and severity

Encourage time-constrained authors
to address critical problems first

Score and page statistics

• All-or-nothing reports discourage users
• Fix an error and watch your score improve!
• Page size includes hidden redirects.

State of the mobile Web...
... seen by the W3C mobileOK Checker

Repartition per number of sub-tests failed
(on ~60000 Web addresses checked by the tool since April 2008)

Examples of mobileOK Web sites: Google search engine, the official mobile version of Wikipedia, the T-Online portal, Remember the milk, the mobile version of Voici.

Level of Adherence to Best Practices

Mobile Web Best Practices not followed

Best Practice	Best Practice explained	URIs (%)	Domains (%)
VALID_MARKUP	Create documents that validate to published formal grammars.	77%	87%
MEASURES	Do not use pixel measures and do not use absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values.	58%	68%
PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT	Ensure that the overall size of page is appropriate to the memory limitations of the device.	54%	66%
CHARACTER_ENCODING_USE	Indicate in the response the character encoding being used.	49%	61%
IMAGES_SPECIFY_SIZE	Specify the size of images in markup, if they have an intrinsic size.	48%	58%
CONTENT_FORMAT_SUPPORT	Send content in a format that is known to be supported by the device.	39%	51%
CACHING	Provide caching information in HTTP responses.	39%	50%
TABLES_LAYOUT	Do not use tables for layout.	34%	38%
POP_UPS	Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.	30%	34%
HTTP_RESPONSE	(Not a real best practice)	27%	33%

Towards a decision-making tool

Conclusion

• Standardisation needed when fragmentation hurts
• Machine-verifiable assertions are key to standards adoption
• Validation is easy
• Education is hard

The End

Contact

François Daoust <fd@w3.org>

W3C Mobile Web Initiative
http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/09-nem-mobileok/

Questions?

• ...

Supported by MobiWeb2.0,
funded by European Union's FP7.