Re: please reivew mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0

(I am an Invited Expert to the W3C HTMLWG. Please send your response to the 
public-html@w3.org list.)

On Monday, June 11, 2007 at 12:04 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> The draft is premised on a vision about mobile browsing that assumes
> special mobile content. Instead of implying a separate Mobile Web, I
> think the W3C should push for one World Wide Web with mobile browsers
> that can access general Web content.
> [...]
> The premise of mobileOK seems to be that you take the non-Web-ready  thin
> browser and expect origin servers out there take special steps  to
> accommodate it.

This is a fundamental criticism I have of the mobileOK guidelines. Mobile
phone networks here in the UK have been promoting their "access the whole
Web on your phone" capabilities for years. They can even do scripting [1].

Because so much web content is text/html, surely it is more useful to work
on improving support for that in UAs? Mainstream mobile UAs already have
better support for HTML than XHTML, many having no support at all for XHTML
[2]. I can browse the text/html Web fine on my mobile phone in the
here-and-now.

PDF and Word documents are also more common than XML formats on the web, in
my experience. Improving support for them would surely be the next logical
priority after HTML?

Advising against W3C technologies such as HTML and PNG seems like a strange
move for a W3C Working Group to take. Especially since these technologies
are already implemented widely.

Sorry if I have misunderstood the guidelines.

[1] <http://alastairc.ac/2006/10/mobile-browsing/>
[2] <http://simon.html5.org/articles/mobile-results>

Ben 'Cerbera' Millard
--------------------
http://projectcerbera.com 

Received on Monday, 11 June 2007 18:48:39 UTC