W3C & the Mobile Web Initiative

[Jonathon Watkins]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?ContentId=4480' target='_blank'>http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.a...?ContentId=4480</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the launch of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) during the WWW2005 Conference, an endeavor to make Web access from a mobile device as simple, easy, and convenient as Web access from a desktop device. "Mobile access to the Web has been a second class experience for far too long," explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile Web experience worthwhile. " . . . Content providers have difficulties building Web sites that work well on all types and configurations of mobile phones offering Web access. Mobile Web Initiative participants will initially focus on two areas: best practices and mobile device descriptions"</i><br /><br />This is certainly to be welcomed. It would be great if 'normal' web pages were accessible from our mobile devices and we weren't sidelined into 'mobile website' cul-de-sacs. Now we just need a decent browser to read the pages with. :wink:

[Pony99CA]

Which means no stupid top-level domain for mobile devices. Just say NO to .mobi :!:

Steve

[ivanii]

I am unsure that most companies will invest money in mobile sites, as, in general, users from mobile devices represent a really small fraction.

So, the most useful thing would be to extend current technology to be more able to deal with mobile devices.

First thing is something that obviously doesn't have anything to do with work of this group, and that is to make mobile browzers understand web pages better. PPC IE is based on IE 3, and just try to view anything on your desktop with that browser. Even IE 6 is a bit outdated, but when Mozilla finishes MiniMo, it will be fine (also, I am not informed about rendering capabilities of mobile Opera, which may be also fine).

Second to that, there might be useful to expand CSS specification to some properties that would be useful to mobile devices. Finally, it would be good that authors could add a CSS scheme that is automatically activated on mobile devices, so that there is different layout for the mobile device.

In general, this last part would be solution, as it is possible that web designers/developers would develop another layout (CSS scheme) as it is still easier than to make new site for the mobile devices. However, that would also require that most of the sites accept modern technics of web design and achieve standards compliance, which is still rather not the case.