Status meetings and postmortems: "I once attended a project’s postmortem meeting in which the developers claimed that the system’s architect had given them an inconsistent and incomplete interface definition for the component they were supposed to write. Now, since a postmortem meeting (which is sometimes referred to as a lessons learned meeting) should result in some lessons, it was decided that in future projects the architect should pay closer attention to details, and the interface definition should be reviewed. Wow! What a lesson."

Mike Rowehl: "Long term I’m a One Web person, but I’m also aware of the fact that The One Web is a long ways off."

Andrea Trasatti: "It is great to hear them talking about the idea that the web should be only one and that everyone should be able to access the exact same contents indipendently from the language, region or medium used, wether he/she has any visual deficiency or any other handicap. We all wish for that to be true some day soon."

I'd agree with both of these smart people. It seems to me that the one web vs mobile web battle is idealism vs pragmatism, and the two don't need to be mutually exclusive in the long term. There's where we want to be, and there's the reality of delivering services in the near future.

What doesn't help is that upgrade cycles in mobile are slower than in the fixed web. We've all been brought up to think that releasing a new browser can get it into the hands of a large chunk of your audience within months, thanks to our experiences with Netscape, IE et al downloading software over the web. This doesn't hold when it comes to mobile: browser software is tightly bound into the actual hardware, you're looking at average 12-18 month cycles for consumers to upgrade their handsets, and need a couple of these cycles to get a large chunk of your audience over to any new technology.

So if a genius or company of geniuses solves the "one web vs mobile web" problem tomorrow with an incredible software product (and I haven't seen a product which would qualify for this), we still have 2-3 years of dealing with the reality of what's out there today before we can all be idealists.

+1: "Mobile could be the greatest media vehicle ever created, greater than even television"

I've taken down the WURFL survey now, after running for a couple of weeks and gathering 136 responses. The full results are here, but a summary of interesting points I've noted:

1. Only 21.3% of WURFL users surveyed have never contributed to it.
2. It's used in the vast majority of cases by application developers (perhaps because they tend to be smaller and can more readily admit to using it - we know of lots of large organisations who use the WURFL, but quite quietly).
3. Overwhelmingly it's used for browser-based services.
4. Half of those surveyed use not just the WURFL data itself, but one of the bundled APIs.
5. Nearly half of respondents patch it with their own data - but fewer than this contribute regularly: naughty!
6. 95% of users rate the WURFL quality as average or better. 65% give it 4 or more out of 5. The WURFL gets similar marks for quality of data.
7. If it wasn't for the WURFL, most folks would be using an in-house solution. So it's clearly saving lots of people time and money.

Thanks to all who responded, and to SurveyMonkey for hosting the survey.

Opera have announced SoonR, which seems to be a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff on mobile phones (via the Opera browser, of course).

From their demos, it looks to me that AJAX on mobile is more about prettying up the interface and incremental UI improvements than it is about bringing anything revolutionary about... highlighted menu selection was kinda nice, the sliding slideshow seemed like a bit of fluff, but their Skype chat with auto refresh (which I note is "coming soon") was the only thing that grabbed me as being really neat.

Of course, the interesting thing about AJAX on the web is that it doesn't only work with a single browser; until mobile AJAX is similarly stable across many devices (which could be a lot further away thanks to the fragmentation in browser standards on phones) then it doesn't really hold the same value. To me it's a Flash competitor right now, scrapping it out with Macromedia at the edges of the mobile development ecosystem whilst WAP, XHTML and Java continue to dominate the mass market.