Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

The Mobile Web Application Best Practices was published as a W3C Recommendation earlier today. There are no further steps at this point: the best practices are a Web standard!

These guidelines provide practical advice for the easy development and deployment of mobile Web applications that work across many platforms. They are complimentary to the former Mobile Web Best Practices standard, though their focus is somewhat orthogonal. This new set of guidelines aims at delivering the best possible user experience, taking advantage of advanced device capabilities when possible.

Since publication of the best practices as a W3C Proposed Recommendation back in October, the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group received and addressed a comment from the EXI Working Group, who (rightly) pointed out that the best practices mentioned EXI as an interesting alternative compression mechanism when it is available, but still seemed to suggest that EXI shared the same drawbacks as other compression techniques (e.g. lack of efficiency for very small files, costs in terms of time and battery usage). EXI was precisely designed to overcome these impediments, and this was the reason why the Mobile Web Best Practices working group had mentioned EXI in the first place. Section 3.4.1 Use Transfer Compression was clarified as a consequence.

That's it! Please read, circulate and use the best practices. Also feel free to point the group to alternative techniques that may be used to implement some of the best practices. Comments on the best practices may be sent to the public public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (with archives).

The Mobile Web Application Best Practices was published as a W3C Proposed Recommendation last week, and we are excited about it within the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, as the Proposed Recommendation step is the last one before publication as a final W3C Recommendation, and is basically synonymous with stable and implemented.

Indeed, over the last few months, we've been gathering implementation feedback for the specification and created an implementation report. We would like to thank the companies and individuals who helped us build this report!

No major change in this new version of the document, although a few clarifications have been made based on comments received:

• we clarified that the 3.2 Security and privacy section does not attempt to provide an exhaustive survey of security issues and added reference to OWASP for a good summary of common Web security Best Practices.
• we clarified that informational images are not good candidates for spriting in 3.4.6 Aggregate Static Images into a Single Composite Resource (Sprites).
• we added a note that new interaction methods are likely to emerge in the future in 3.5.3 Design for Multiple Interaction Methods and added reference to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 as available guidelines for assistive technology.
• we added another example to the 3.5.6 Make Telephone Numbers "Click-to-Call" section that uses the SMS scheme defined in RFC5724, noting that support for this scheme is limited at the time of writing though.

The final review period for this Proposed Recommendation runs through 19 November 2010. It is more particularly directed at the W3C Membership, although other interested parties may send comments as well.

Do you declare the size of the viewport in your mobile Web site? Do you merge background images as CSS sprites to reduce the number of requests needed to render the page? Use fragments IDs to drive your Web application view? Set cache related HTTP headers so that AJAX data can be cached? If the answer to any of these points is yes, we — the Mobile Web Best Practices working group — are very much looking for your implementation feedback!

Context for this is the Mobile Web Application Best Practices specification, published as a second Last Call Working Draft a few days ago. The implementation report details the implementation feedback received so far. Three best practices were moved to advisory notes in the latest version of the specification based on that.

The statements for which we're still looking for more evidence are:

• Aggregate Static Images into a Single Composite Resource (Sprites)
• Cache Resources By Fingerprinting Resource References
• Cache AJAX Data
• Use Fragment IDs to Drive Application View
• Consider Mobile Specific Technologies for Initiating Web Applications
• Use Meta Viewport Element To Identify Desired Screen Size

We're confident that there are many great Web applications out there that follow one or more of these statements. If you developed one of them, we would be extremely grateful if you could tell us about it!

Instructions to submit feedback are to be found in the implementation report template. It's merely a question of providing a bit of information about your application and sending it to either the member-bpwg@w3.org mailing-list (only visible by W3C members) or to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org public mailing-list, depending on the visibility you'd prefer. You do not need to implement more than one of these best practices to send an implementation report!

You're also welcome to submit implementation feedback about other best practices, of course! You may also wish to comment on the document by 6 August 2010, following the instructions in the Status of This Document section.