mobileOK test misleading

I just tried a couple of my pages out with the mobileOK checker, and concerned about the expectations that I think are wrongly set for many people who might use the tool.  The lead-in sentence at http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ says "Is your site mobileOK?"  That suggests that you can check whether your XHTML 1.0 or HTML pages served as text/html will work well on a mobile device.  If you think that, the report you get back initially  causes some confusion (and I'm hoping not more than that, ie. doesn't lead people to do things like remove the lang attribute from their <html> tag), and also annoyance when you realize that you've been wasting your time, since this wasn't meant to test general pages at all, but rather pages served specifically as XHTML Basic 1.1.

I think the label for the submission form should be much more clear about what you are testing, ie. mobileOK Basic™ conformance.

I also think that the results page should provide different output for people who are not using the XHTML Basic 1.1 DTD, perhaps explaining what the latter is, and how it can be used, but certainly modifying the failure criteria so that people aren't castigated for what is actually good practice in their own particular format. For example, please don't discourage use of the lang attribute in documents served as text/html - we've been working for a long time to get people to do just that. 

Hope that helps,
RI


PS: Clicking on the link at http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/BPWG/Group/TaskForces/Checker/#involved to the public list yields an incorrect address: public-mbileok-checker@w3.org


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Thursday, 14 August 2008 11:34:56 UTC