A bit o'travel has left me with some time to run through the mobile web best practices document. Some thoughts typed up:

1. The document states that its "primary goal is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from mobile devices.". Does this imply that there are many situations where the document doesn't seek to apply? e.g. in any WAP/XHTML-MP services being produced (which are mobile-specific, not web sites)? Or am I reading the document too pedantically? To me, the web on mobile seems to be distinct from mobile apps which might share elements of infrastructure or technology.

2. Given the comparative rarity of devices which can browse "the mobile web" today (we're talking PDAs and a few high-end handsets aren't we?) then am I right in thinking that this document is focused more on a hypothetical future of 2-3 years away than around services being built today/tomorrow?

3. I'd agree with most of the recommendations. They seem in some parts to be head-thumpingly simple and obvious, but I've been very close to this industry for some time now so that's to be expected, I think (and IMHO one characteristic of a good idea is that it's obvious in retrospect). I don't believe these are necessarily obvious to a target audience of web developers.

4. I'd be interested to hear more about the advantages of mobile devices (section 3.7). This might provide a more positive counterweight to a document which is otherwise on a fairly negative slant (in that it's otherwise focused on limitations, things we cut out of the web to make mobile, etc.)

5. I'd agree with the assertion in section 4.2 that adaptation is required to deliver all non-trivial mobile services. We even saw this on the fixed internet (netscape vs ie) - sure, we got the users to make a decision as to which version they see (mmm that's a nice user experience) but it still happened.

Overall, this seems like a reasonable starting point to me. I don't see anything here that I violently disagree with; much of it seems vague but I suspect (not that I've ever been involved in an effort like this) that with many vendors pulling in different directions, any consensus is a success.

One weirdie tho: why is the semantic markup section there, when even the group admits it doesn't know what it is? Is TBL standing over them with a Big Stick?

Comments

[Jo Rabin]

As editor of that document I'd say you are basically right in your assumptions. I really strongly encourage you or anyone else for that matter to feed back on the public mailing list at public-bpwg@w3.org where I think your questions would benefit the community, and where you will no doubt get a reply!

thanks
Jo

[Tom Hume]

So he *is* standing over you with a big stick???

[Chaals]

Hi, thanks for your comments.

No, he isn't standing over us at all. There are some Semantic Web types (me, Phil Archer from ICRA, among others) involved in the group, and of course a lot of the adaptation people are using metadata in one form or another (be it CC/PP, WURFL, UAProf, some in-house proprietary database, or a combination of those and other.

But IMHO there are a couple of related threads in the current draft section. As it happens they both come from old stuff (in this case the primary source is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

The first idea is using XHTML (etc) correctly, so that if something is a heading it is marked as one and vice versa.

The second is about providing metadata that allows users (and adaptation services) to optimise their use of the data. What is unclear in that is exactly which metadata is important, and how to provide it (shipping pages of dublin core in HTML meta elements is pretty clearly not the obvious way to go for mobiles...

As the other editor of the document, I agree with Jo that your comments make a lot of sense. In particular, the current state of play is that the version we have does not particularly seek to apply to WML - the "baseline device" section needs to be sorted and will clarify what we believe the document covers properly. Hopefully a lot of the best practices are also relevant to purely mobile-oriented services (because that means we are not going to have such trouble making the web work across the range of devices), but the first target is ordinary web developers, as you have surmised.

Thanks for the comments - like Jo I encourage sending comments to the feedback list.

Cheers

Chaals

[Tom Hume]

Shame the baseline doesn't cover WML- like it or not, that's going to be what we have to work with for the next 18 months - 3 years thanks to the installed base. At best content providers will have to provide WML + mobile web versions, surely? Or am I either mistaken or missing the point here?

[Jo Rabin]

I think the point about WML (and CHTML and anything else for that matter) is, if the cap fits, wear it. Please can we move the disucssion to the list at public-bpwg@w3.org as this point is widely misunderstood (editors take note for next version) and the community would benefit hugely from the discussion. Not that your blog is not widely read, Tom :-)