Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group News

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.