Re: The devices-universal websites "myth" and the semantic web

On 6/17/05, Rotan Hanrahan <Rotan.Hanrahan@mobileaware.com> wrote:
> 
> To be fair to Kai, he's doing a good job of highlighting some of the challenges we face. If he truly believed that it was all negative, he wouldn't be bothering to participate. He would have by now abandoned technology and taken up a career in oil painting or gardening. I'm sure that in the spirit of a Best Practices group, Kai will not only be able to highlight examples of poor practice, but also point to examples where he believes good practice is being demonstrated.
> 
> Single source, multi-device authoring is possible, but it does require the author to do a little more effort. Not as much as having to author for each device separately, as some commercial solutions can demonstrate. The challenge is to minimise the amount of additional work needed by the author, so that the amount of motivation needed to convince the author to do this work is reduced, and thereby increase the amount of Web content that becomes device independent. The nirvana case, where the amount of authoring effort is similar to the current effort required for the single-channel fixed Web, I believe is not possible. There just isn't enough (semantic) information in a traditional Web page to ensure it is adaptable.
> 
> I think a lot of the examples that Kai highlights are related to the limitations (or errors) of the user agent, which naturally puts a limitation on the adaptation possibilities. I'm sure these issues are resolvable

The point is that limitations are there. There is no way that the W3C
will solve the bugs or limitations in WAP browsers (or web browsers
for mobile devices). So maybe the best practices group should push the
manufacturers and browser developers to try to squish the nasty bugs
that limit the developers most AND direct the software developers
towards the right direction to do what you just said: minimize the
effort to develop contents for mobile devices.

In my previous email I named the CMS, and that was because the CMS
includes a database an interface to add and modify contents and manage
the output. This is what needs to be tailored to produce contents that
fits any device.
What I am trying to say is that we can sit here and say that mobile
browsers suck, but that won't solve the problem. In my opinion the
right path is to talk all together and identify the best path to avoid
them and still produce a good experience to the user. This is what I
would expect from a "best practices" manual.

Also we should identify if the "best practices" is directed to web
sites developers, software developers or browser developers. If we
want to let know the browser developers about their bugs, then we only
need a Bugzilla.
In my opinion we are here to discuss the experiences we have had and
try to find a path and suggest it to other developers. This is what I
would expect from a "Best practices".

Device descriptors should then give you the tools to apply the "best practices".

I will wait for more comments. Let's make sure that all our passion is
into making something worth and useful for everyone.

-- 

Andrea Trasatti
atrasatti@gmail.com
Experimental Blog: http://trasatti.blogspot.com

Received on Friday, 17 June 2005 13:22:49 UTC