Test Mobile Web Best Practices on Disaster System?

"Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0" 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-mobile-bp-20051017/> is intended to: "... 
provide guidance to players in the mobile value chain as to best practices 
for production of web sites and of Web content intended for delivery to 
mobile devices.".

It is not clear to me there are any viable commercial applications for 
mobile devices. Many of the proposed applications seem contrived and 
trivial. This makes it difficult to get business and IT people to take the 
mobile web seriously.

I suggest we need some serious and useful, if not profitable, applications 
to test the technology on and demonstrate its usefulness. An example might 
be the Sahana Open Source disaster management system. This was created for 
finding missing persons, coordinating relief organizations and tracking 
victims in relief camps for the December 2004 Tsunami.

The first version of Sahana used a table based web interface. I suggested 
use a CSS based interface which would be compatible with a mobile device: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/sahana2.shtml>. Some of this has now been 
implemented in Version 2, released 1 December and available free at: 
<http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127855>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml

Received on Sunday, 4 December 2005 22:22:12 UTC