Re: please reivew mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0

On 6/11/07, Ben 'Cerbera' Millard <cerbera@projectcerbera.com> wrote:
> 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.

The reason the recommendation talks about XHTML Basic is not because
it's XHTML, but because of the "Basic" part. XHTML Basic defines a
subset of XHTML that is suitable for the mobile context (and yes here
I acknowledge the debate about whether XHTML Basic should even exist).
It's convenient to advocate use of this existing standard because of
it's mobile-oriented nature, not because of any XML-related features.
The alternative is to, I suppose, define HTML Basic, which seems
unnecessary. As you note, many browsers are just parsing XHTML (Basic)
as HTML anyway.

> 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?

Maybe -- the focus here is on the content side rather than user agent
side. I believe user agents have matured a little faster than the
content -- it's not that we're lacking decent mobile browsers but that
we're lacking plenty of good, usable mobile content. Hence the focus
on content rather than user agents.

> 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.

Advise against HTML or PNG? nothing in the specification says this.
The spec advocates XHTML Basic (Basic being the key part there, not
the X) and GIF and JPEG since PNG isn't as widely supported.

Sean

Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 12:21:19 UTC