Re: Last Call Comments on "Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0" (13 Jan 2006 draft)

Hi Werner,

I believe your reply below is not inconsistent with my comment. I hear
that there are two goals:

 * Design once for the Web and let the client adapt content as necessary
 * Design to optimize the mobile browsing experience

One ideal is that by doing the first, you get the second for free. I
suspect that ideal does not hold up in practice, and so you may have to
provide alternatives to the general design to make it even more usable
in a mobile environment. I would like MWI BP to start with the design-for-all
principle, then explain what makes the mobile context special, and then
how I can do as little as possible to make my general design more usable
in the mobile context. If the message is "You always have to do content
adaptation for a good mobile experience." then I think I need to learn
a lot more about the intent of this document. I hope the message is 
more like "You should endeavor to _not_ have to do content adaptation; 
but here are there are some cases when you might, and here's what they 
are and how to deal with them effectively."

Allowing the user to select from among alternative views seems reasonable enough,
but there is an effort to choosing, and so the user should not have
to make that choice very often. So please start with the ideal -- authors 
author once and users do not have to fiddle with their views -- and work 
from there.

Thank you,

  Ian


> Dear Ian,
> 
> To clarify my point, the same way in which Gmail users have the option to
> switch between a basic HTML page, a standard without chat page and a
> standard with chat page, we should also be able to provide users with the
> ability to choose between standard mobile page and standard PC page.
> --
> Cheers,
> Werner
> 
> http://hephailnews.blogspot.com
> 
> 
> On 2/15/06, Werner Egipsy Souza <hephail@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Ian,
> >
> > In the Abstract, your comment was
> >
> > >Please start early with the "One Web" message, for example by adding
> > something like this to the end of the preceding sentence: "An
> > >important Web design principle (discussed, for example, in section
> > 4.3 of "Architecture of the World Wide Web") is to design content that
> > >is flexible enough to enable a valuable user experience for a variety
> > of devices. This document explains how to design for "one Web" while
> > >also optimizing for the mobile experience."
> >
> > The issue here, is that there are many web-based applications, which
> > would have facilities purely for the mobile environment,which is
> > heavily reliant on real world parameters, such as time, company,
> > location and proximity
> >
> > Hence, making a page which satisfies both the desktop, which is an
> > environment isolated from the real world, and the mobile, which is
> > embedded in the real world, does not seem feasible.
> > --
> > Cheers,
> > Werner
>  
> Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
> Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447