Web Everywhere by Tom Hume
Charlie is exactly right about everyone needing to check out the talk given by Tom Hume at d.Construct 2005. Fantastic stuff in there. I liked this one:
There’s lots of technical similarities between mobile and web. There’s lots of places where it overlaps. Lots of mobile services use basically a web server with pages and files sitting out there. They use similar sorts of markup languages, maybe XHTML. Java’s been moved quite successfully from - well Java’s moved all over the place. But from applets onto mobile phones. But this is just a tiny slice of the pie. If you’re building any sort of mobile service, or in fact any sort of web service, the time you spend writing that markup lanaguage compared to the time you spend doing everything else is absolutely minimal. When you think about what’s involved in building a modern website these days. You’ve got the planning side of it, doing interaction design, information architecture, database design for the backend, middleware, integrating all that stuff together, testing it across different browsers, installing documentation. The actual bit of that where you’re writing the markup langauge is very very tiny. So the fact that you’re having to use different markup lanaguages in different places doesn’t actually matter all that much. It’s more the thinking behind the application which matters.
Tom makes some great points, and helps to emerge some of the things I believe a lot of us find frusterating about the current state of mobile. There’s so much potential there, but what we keep seeing are folks trying to jam a web experience into the mobile environment. And of course everyone involved in the experience ends up frusterated. We haven’t seen too many instances of “mobile applications”, for the most part just applications which can be interacted with from a handset.
However I also have to consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and if we should be inverting the way we think about this. If the current crop of technologies yeild crap applications because developers thinking in terms of markup languages generate complex and cumbersome interfaces does that mean we need a different way to specify mobile markup? Is the move to unify the fixed and mobile web on a single markup style hurting the mobile web instead of helping it? Is it making folks mistakenly classify their website as “mobile” because their markup might pass a W3C validator - focusing attention on the wrong areas?
I don’t think so, I would love to see a unified web. But the talk did make me think and question some things I though I had already thought through completely. Which for me means it’s an excellent bit of commentary. Great work Tom!
