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:

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: