RE: Best Practices document - not best practices

Daniel wrote:
> If you're talking about the typically large amount of mostly 
> redundant "branding" and navigation information that 
> typically appears at the top (and frequently left) of pages:  
> That's not a tool issue, that's a page design issue (or 
> possibly a page implementation issue).

To many organisations the branding and design of their web information
is extremely important, and they spend a lot of time, money and other
resource on these areas of content development.

Some regard the design of a site as irrelevant and sometimes slight
'design' driven sites as suffering from the flaw of valuing 'style over
content'

However, in recent years where digital media has been embraced by the
artistic community, there are many examples of sites where the
style/design *is* the content.

Why shouldn't these sites be accessible on mobile devices, by those
users who appreciate that particular art form.
 

> Designers apparently think users need a link to everywhere 
> from every single page (yes, okay, I exaggerate a bit), 
> instead of just some "breadcrumbs" to show where you are 
> within the site (and/or larger
> document) and a link or two up toward higher-level pages that 
> provide downward (and sideways) navigation links.

Maybe a solution to this is to include (semi-automatically if using a
tool) metadata in the markup that denotes these parts of the page as
being navigation blocks.  This could allow the browser software to
choose not to display them with the meat/content.  The browser could
perhaps implement some hotkey or shortcut mechanism to allow the user to
quickly jump between the navigation and content elements of a page.

Hopefully the site would then still be usable on a mobile device, and
wouldn't require a complete redesign.


One of the MWI's success criteria is:
"User community and Industry adoption of the deliverables."

I believe that the content industry (mobile or otherwise) is unlikely
adopt the deliverables if it feels that huge amount of redesign effort
is required to comply with the Best Practices, when the end result is
design and branding free sites like websites were back in 1996





 
 
Tim Moss
CTO
Bango
 
e: tim@bango.com
m: +44 78 8779 4032
t: +44 12 2347 2823
w: http://www.bango.com
 
  
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Received on Sunday, 31 July 2005 08:59:19 UTC