Planet Mobile Web
I’ve been included in the Planet Mobile Web aggregation of blogs. Looks like it should be a great resource for helping to move the mobile web effort forward. Thanks Dominique! In the interest of helping to push things along I would like to share an interesting little thinko with respect to mobile web stuff (hat tip to Sathya from MobiSiteGalore for pointing this out to me while demoing their mobile site creator). There’s an online tool available to check a site against the recommendations. Still alpha, of course, the recomendations are still being worked on. Here’s a few things to pay attention to:
- checking Nokia.mobi yields 50 errors
- Vodafone.mobi has 85
- the .mobi site for dotMobi itself has 5 errors
- the output of Google’s mobile transcoder yields about 18 per page
- the validator seems to fail completely on WML, which I still see being used quite a bit in off-portal independent mobile sites
- the Wordpress Mobile plugin output yields 27
It’s a tough chicken-or-the-egg kind of problem. Hard to get people to follow the best practices until there are already sites that follow the best practices. And as best practices there should be some samples of sites that do conform, otherwise they’re not really “practices”. Just collected recommendations.
So how to crack that nut? Working with the open source projects would certainly be one way. Do pages generated with WALL conform to the practices? That would be one way to bootstrap the collection of content, if all that automatically generated markup displayed the attributes checked for in the validator. Same goes for bits of open source like the Wordpress mobile plugin and the Drupal mobile theme. Getting huge swaths of content out of folks like Google and Skweezer by making sure their transcoding services output in a form that jives with the validator would also be a big win I suppose.
Interesting resources on this theme:
November 12th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices are particularly guilty of this–they are even referred to as “forward-looking best practices”. Does anyone else find that a self-contradiction and just a little bit scary for a “Proposed Recommendation”? -m
November 12th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Mike,
Well done for finding this link (the W3 tester site)! I just ran it on CNN - 1105 errors.
Here’s a thought for you on a solution to web site problem. What if the web servers themselves knew exactly what the terminal capabilities of the target device was? For instance - what if you could know in real time the current page size (320*240) screen resolution 144dpi, and number of colors 65,000, plus the connection speed. With that kind of information you have the web server generate a dynamic page which conformed exactly to the devices specs.
I think the real problem is figuring out the devices capabilities - until you can do that accurately, everything else is just a guess.
Thanks again for the link, definitely going in the bookmarks.
Peter
November 12th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
mTLD has released their much awaited mobiReady report. http://mr.dev.mobi/
It tests the website for mobile readiness. The generated test report is very comprehensive. The tool is still in its Beta but think its the best available test tool at this point of time.
Prashanth
November 16th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
you may read what the creator of WALL (who is also a member of the W3C BPWG group) thinks of BP here:
http://www.passani.it/gap/intro.htm
WALL predates BP by two years. Anyway, I would say that WALL and BP are independent things: you can use WALL to create BP and non-BP sites alike.
Luca
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Hearty agreement on that last sentence. I think that making Skweezer’s output validate at least 95% is an important goal. Mr. Passani’s GAP is a fine effort on the mobile standards front as well, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting with the delta between the W3CBP and GAP.
Skweezer has for several years included stars at the bottom of web pages to indicate pre-processed mobile-readiness. In light of standards and validators like these however, a more standard/meaningful score is called for.
Excellent blog, Mike. Subscribed.
Barnabas Kendall, CTO
Greenlight Wireless