Re: Feedback on MWBP 1.0

On 17 Nov 2005, at 08:17, Magnus Lönnroth wrote:

> I hope so. In my opinion focus should be on mobile devices browsing  
> THE
> web. For that you need HTML and HTTP. I personally do not want WAP/ 
> WML,
> ringtones, MMS, J2ME, etc to be part of all this.

This, I think, highlights something I'm not clear on: all this "one  
web" business.

Is this hypothetical future a single web, where consumers want to use  
web sites on their mobile devices? Or a web where certain services  
are specifically oriented towards mobiles? Or neither of the above?

> In my opinion web designers have been in a downward spiral since  
> day one
> of the web. For reasons unknown to me, they seem to increasingly  
> prefer
> atrocities like fixed-width layout and fixed-size fonts, etc. I  
> hope we
> can create a strong message saying "No, this is not OK to do". It's
> actually one of the major reasons why THE web isn't working very  
> well on
> small screens.

There were lots of people giving out that message in the early days  
of the web too, which led to browser manufacturers going their own  
way (cf Netscape adding custom tags etc). I can certainly see the  
value of pushing a message like this though.

> Well, I think there's consensus that meta-data (=semantic markup)  
> is going
> to be needed in order to do any useful content adaptation. In what  
> form is
> TBD - I personally hope the BPWG will favor ease-of-use over  
> elegance and
> recommend something dirt-simple like an element attribute and *not*  
> a new
> XML namespace etc.

So is working out what sort of metadata we should add in, part of the  
scope of this document?

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Received on Thursday, 17 November 2005 09:53:51 UTC