RE: FYI - "Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998"

A few comments in return.

> But that's alternative representations within the same site.

Be careful to distinguish between alternative representations (which exclude
each other), and different representations (i.e. various modalities or aspects
of the same information). The former are actually redundant (frame and no-frame,
media queries), and it is questionable why they should be tied up into one 
bundle in the first place -- and in different places and with different syntaxes
within it. The latter are complementary: I am not deaf, but I may appreciate
to have captions on a video -- in case I have to mute the loudspeaker, or the 
sound is poor, or I do not understand the spoken accent. Accessibility relates 
to this situation, whereas device adaptation issues, and internationalization, 
i.e. having versions of the same site in various languages, relate to the former
one.

> I didn't see the data in the article, just conclusions.

Nielsen made it clear he was preparing another round of testing before publishing
a detailed report -- which I presume you will then be able to acquire for, hem, 
a reasonable fee...

> But if we had continued to make IE-only sites, Netscape-only sites  
> in 1998, the Web would be a vastly more impoverished environment now,

Tell me about it. Nevertheless, in 2009, we are still relying upon special 
mechanisms, markup and even scripts to cope with browser quirks, especially 
those of IE.

> It might be interesting to do a historical comparison of the form "The
> mobile Web is where the desktop Web was x years ago" and plot it over
> time. 

The premise that the mobile Web has only been catching up with the desktop Web
would bias the analysis. After all, click-to-call URL were widely deployed on
the mobile Web (e.g. i-Mode) first, and screen-touch interaction has become
widespread in the mobile Web whereas I doubt it ever overcame its status of a 
specialized niche on desktops. 


E.Casais

Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 15:01:26 UTC