Charter re-wording thoughts

http://www.w3.org/2008/11/18-mwts-minutes.html#action14
http://www.w3.org/2008/11/mwi-test-charter.html

My ulterior motives with the mwts charter, is to raise its profile and
to encourage Web developers or organisations to get involved and
contribute.

I think "suites" sounds a little overwhelming. Especially since the
'Web Compatibility Test' is the direction I'd like to see this group
maintain.

So I suggest substitutions like s/test suites/tests/ or s/test
suites/test products/ when appropriate.

Then I think it's important to make it clear the tests are not "mobile
specific" necessarily. I'd like to see 'mobile profile' stuff dropped.
We use "device independent" tests that in our case identify
shortcomings with mobile browsers. Once identified we then can
prioritize a list of tests, much like the WCT already does.


WRT to dependencies, it would be good to be linked straight up to
HTML5. This is after all what mobile browsers should be targeting in
the long term. I still think there is more javascripty stuff we could
do. I have no idea how the ECMAscript liaisons would work there.

For example I keep running into memory limitation problems with
Javascript and Pocket IE. Like how long can a string be? This is kinda
useful to be aware of this on mobiles, with people are passing around
huge JSON strings in mashups. Future tests could help authors become
more aware of the inevitable limitations of mobile devices like memory
and battery etc.



Perhaps I am going really too far here. Though I was thinking the mwts
could almost become a report of the state of the industry. I don't
know of any other group filling the role of informing developers that
say static SVG now works on Iphones. We could of course phrase this
differently informally blogging (or tweeting :-) for e.g. something
like "Congratulations to the Safari Mobile/5G77 developers which
which passes the static SVG test (12/16 WCT 1.4)". Be good to score
devices too or would a leaderboard go totally overboard WRT vendor
neutrality?

So besides providing targets for mobile UA vendors to hit, it would be
cool to inform Web developers that the Web platform on mobiles is
pretty viable. All they need to do is probably think how to make their
applications a little leaner. For consumers, I did actually think that
end consumers might check their potential purchase with WCT, though I
am starting to think that's a little too ambitious. ;)

Received on Monday, 24 November 2008 14:43:42 UTC