Mobile Web Best Practices should help smartphone browsing
Published by Steve Litchfield at 11:45 UTC, June 28th 2006
W3C, the standards body behind the Web, have released new guidelines, dubbed "Mobile Web Best Practices" and signed off by many major names, including Microsoft and Nokia. The document is a must-read for anyone producing smartphone/PDA-friendly web content.
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http://www.w3.org/ -- 27 June 2006 -- Today, W3C reached an important milestone toward its mission of making it as easy to use the Web on a mobile device as on a desktop computer. W3C has published
Mobile Web Best Practices a Candidate Recommendation, an indication of broad consensus on the technical content of the document.
W3C now invites implementation experience from the community. Industry leaders are declaring their support for the guidelines, which explain how to develop Web sites that work on mobile devices. "There are many devices, but one Web," said Daniel Appelquist, chair of the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group. "Practical guidelines on how to create content once that can be delivered to the plethora of devices saves developers and organizations time and money, and has the added benefit of not breaking the Web. "
More in the full press release...
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News Discussion
ceemrl
I think I saw this presented at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh (
http://martinlittle.com/thinkthin/2006/05/28/235030.php) and it is disappointing to see that it has taken so long to get these agreed and down on paper.
Many of the suggestions are basic ideas that should have been sorted waaaay back, and it must have been incredibly painful for the authors to get agreement from all parties involved. I wonder if they will actually get used...
Rafe
It is sad that it has taken this long. Most of the recommendation are common sense and have more to do with designing for small screens. Of cours eif you're speficially targetting smatphone some of the recommendation (e.g. Cookies support issues) are less applicable. Still good to see an initial starting point.
Minhajkk
New in mobile-devlopment
Unregistered
If you're not ready or can't afford the time to re-design your pages so that they work flawlessly on both "full-size" and mobile devices, it's fairly easy to provide alternate pages for mobile devices. In many cases, it's easy to divide your pages into those that mobile users need "right now" and those that most users would want to view later at home on their big screen. Of course, this depends on what kind of site you have.Make your mobile pages "tiny" and divide up the content into several smaller pages -- I find that this really forced me to think about Information Architecture much more deeply, and led to a very useful re-structuring of some of my "full-size" pages as well.
himanshi
Okay, you know how I like talking to myself about these "complex" subjects... Make sense? I got "IT". It comes down to this. Go to your website, disable styles, what do you see?Now, disable images, what do you see?And worse case scenario, disable JS, what happens?Does your site work on a mobile device?Are you ready for One web?
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