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).