Dan’s Blog (2.0)

W3C are producing an online training course for mobile Web developers: “An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices” which will run from May 26 to June 20 2008. This will be a great chance to get more information on mobile Web development practices from the experts — highly recommended for any Web developers out there who are interested in getting into mobile.

W3C is organizing an online course to introduce Web developers and designers to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices.

In this course you will:

• • * learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform
  • * learn how to use W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to mobilize existing content
  • * discover the relevant W3C resources for mobile Web design

Participants will have access to lectures and assignments providing hands-on practical experience with using W3C’s mobile Web Best Practices. They will have direct access to W3C experts on this topic who are the instructors for this course. Participants will also be able to discuss and share experiences with their peers who are faced with the challenges of mobile Web design.

More information at
http://www.w3.org/2008/03/MobiWeb101/Overview.html

Register now at
http://www.3gwebtrain.com/moodle/

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 13:23 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: Mobile, MobileWeb, MWI, Training, W3C, Web

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I was very lucky this past week to have been invited to Seoul (along with the other members of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Descriptions and Ubiquitous Web working groups) to participate in something that came to be know as Mobile Web Week.

The week of W3C working group meetings was punctuated by a day-long open workshop which we named W3C Mobile Wednesday. (Yes, my intention is to mobilize every day of the week - already we have had Mobile Monday and Mobile Sunday. Now Wednesday has fallen. Can Thursday be far behind?) Mobile Wednesday was actually a unique opportunity to hear from people working in Korea on the sharp end of the Mobile Web and to do a little bit of a sales job about the work we’ve been doing in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and why it might be relevant there.

One factor that greatly helped create a feeling of open dialog was the presence of simultaneous translation during the whole event. It’s a luxury I almost never get to experience, but it really can help to facilitate discussion when someone else is worrying about the burden of translation. The translators were a wonder - deftly dealing with sometimes very thick technical discussion, especially during the panel sessions.

Besides Mobile Wednesday, I also had the pleasure of speaking to many Koreans living and breathing the Mobile Web, including representatives of the Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, the Korean W3C office, ETRI, and of the Korean companies involved in W3C activities, such as SK-Telecom and Samsung.

So - what impressions am I left with after this week?

I have more questions than answers, but my overall impressions are that the challenges to the growth of the mobile Web in Korea are similar to the challenges the world over. Perceptions about usage and comparisons to the “real web” are also a problem. I have to respectfully disagree with a statement made by one of the other conference speakers that Korean use of the Mobile Web hasn’t taken off because “Koreans already have very high speed access to the Web at home and at the office.” Yes, Broadband penetration is really high in Korea. However, the use cases for using the Web on the move are different from the use cases for using it in front of a computer. Other speakers at the event highlighted some of these, particular social gaming and one-to-many messaging. Interesting side-note, nobody seemed to know what Twitter was but there are apparently a couple of similar Korean services.

One basic challenge Koreans might have to bringing the Web to the phone is the high use of Flash. Seems that most Korean (PC) Web sites are full of Flash content. Even the photo of me that appeared in the Korean tech news article was embedded in Flash for some reason. The fact that these sites aren’t working on even highly sophisticated mobile browsers is no doubt putting people off the concept of mobilizing the Web.

In any case, it was a very educational an informative week. Special thanks go out to Jonathan Jeon (전종홍) for his role in putting it all together and for posting some great video of the Mobile Wednesday event (see link).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:22 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWednesday, MWI, Seoul

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François Daoust of W3C and I were interviewed by the Korean press about the work of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group.  Unfortunately,  the article hasn’t been translated so I have no idea what they said about us, but hey — any publicity is good publicity, I suppose.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:45 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: ETNews, Korea, MobileWeb, MWI, Seoul, W3C

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I’m sitting in the Korean Airlines lounge in Narita (Tokyo) airport after an 11 hour flight from London, watching a seemingly endless succession of JAL 747s taking off. When I arrived, there were no promised uniformed agents showing me the way. All the doors marked “international connections” were closed. In the end, I had to find my way through a very forbidding looking corridor and I was sure I was going to be turned back and possibly detained, but the airport staff I eventually found were very helpful and guided me to the checkpoint I needed for my connection. So, here I sit, stealing WiFi from the Northwest lounge next door.

In an hour I’ll be on another flight on my way to Seoul, South Korea. I don’t speak a word of Korean, I have no local currency and I’ve most likely packed the wrong plug adapters. But on Monday morning, I will convene the next face to face meeting of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group. After that, I plan to participate in an event called W3C Mobile Wednesday, a kind of east-meets-west open conference-style event bringing together people working in mobile Web standardization and those working on the sharp end of the mobile Web in Korea: people from manufacturers and operators, yes, but also entrepreneuers, bloggers, developers. It’s all thanks to the Korean Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, ETRI, and the people at the W3C offfice in Korea. I’m very excited about this event and this whole week. Besides making some real progress on the work of the Mobile Web Best Practices group, I hope to get a real flavor for how the mobile Web (and other digital services) are being delivered in Korea, a place that showcases (according to Jim O’Reilly and Tomi Ahonen in their book Digital Korea) the “Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home”.
That and enjoy some good kimchi.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 2:06 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: Korea, mobile2.0, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

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In June 2005, I wrote in these pages about an issue I knew we were going to have to grapple with in the Mobile Web Best Practices group that we were then kicking off. What is the intersection of mobility and accessibility when it comes to Web content? In fact, the initial approach and early work of the group that set the foundations for the Mobile Web Best Practices and for MobileOK was based on the work of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, and specifically the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document.

This week, we have followed up the release of MobileOK with a new document that details exactly that: describe the relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Why should you care? If you’re trying to provide a service on the Web, you need to care about both accessibility and mobility. Both of these topics require some investment in skills, tools, and development time, so understanding where the overlaps are should greatly help to reduce development costs and time to market. At the end of the day, it’s also about maximizing the potential audience for your service, regardless of a user’s disability or the device used to access that service.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:33 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, MWI, W3C, wai

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I just spoke at Mobile Internet World here in Boston (as part of the W3C Mobile Web Standards track). Being part of this event brought me back to the first “Internet World” conference I ever attended in, wait for it, 1993 in New York City. I had been invited up there because my magazine, Quanta. At the time, the Web was a fringe at best. The event was meager, at best, but there was a definitely a sense that something important was happening. Mobile Internet World, in Boston in 2007, was considerably more impressive, but yet I had the same feeling of excitement. People were coming to this W3C session to learn about mobile Web standards and development. This crowd was not mobile industry people - I did not get the idea that I was preaching to the choir. I think that’s signifigant in the “mainstreaming” of the Mobile Internet.

I’m interested to see if I get the same vibe at Future of Mobile tomorrow in London.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:49 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: futureofmobile, mobileinternetworld, MobileWeb, W3C

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“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” Well, thumb-surfers the world over took a step closer to being able to experience rich Mobile Web applications last week with the release of the Web Integration Compound Document (WICD — pronounced wicked). I wrote about WICD in InformIT almost two years ago. It’s taken that long to shake out the bugs in the specification. In the mean time, a lot has happened on the mobile Web front, but the WICD specification is more important than ever. Why? Because it promises a predictable environment for creating rich Web applications across browser implementations that integrate rich vector-based graphics and animations that can scale to different screen sizes and layouts. It’s like Ajax on SVG steroids. Opera already provides partial support in Opera Mobile (and has committed full support), but in order to truly deliver on that promise, it needs to be deployed across multiple browser platforms. Now that it has gone to “Candidate Recommendation” stage in the W3C, it will have that chance.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:04 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, OperaMobile, W3C, WICD

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It’s 10:00 on Monday and Tim Berners-Lee has just delivered his keynote address. The key message: the Web is an open platform and an enabling technology layer and as the Web moves into the mobile platform (”convergence”), we need to keep the Web open. It’s a simple message, but it bears repeating, especially here at 3GSM where so much of the hype tends to be about vertical applications such as Mobile TV and music downloads. The Web’s openness is precisely what has fueled its success and allowed it to be such a global success story. I hope that message is received here at the conference.

Side note: there is no free wireless network here! There is a “pay for” wireless network available — for €200! I don’t think so. Very unimpressed. Come on GSM Association — get someone to sponsor free Wifi. There’s sponsorship on everything else — it shouldn’t be so difficult. A so-called “back-channel” is becoming de regeur at events like this around the world. Especially as 3GSM embraces so-called Internet-Mobile convergence, it’s vital to activate that back-channel.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:09 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: 3gsm

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After a great meeting of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group last week, the group decided to issue a “Last Call” working draft of the mobileOK Basic specification. This spec is basically a series of tests you can perform on content to evaluate how well it implements the best practices themselves. Because many of the best practices are not machine testable, these test necessarily only represent a subset of the best practices, but they’re a good place to start (hence “basic”). The specification (actually “mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0″) is intended to raise the quality bar on mobile Web content. I invite you to review it and send comments in to the public W3C mailing list (public-bpwg-comments@w3.org).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:34 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: mobileOK, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

1 Comment

Well — I’m off Blogger and on to Wordpress. The whole process was surprisingly simple. I’ve been wringing my hands about doing this for months now thanks to the Wordpress migration tools, the whole thing was virtually painless. I feel like I’ve gone from a Volkswagen to a Ferrari. Wordpress is so configurable. It’s got a whole ecosystem of plug-ins and themes (including the aforementioned wp-mobile plug-in which detects mobile browsers and feeds them mobile-friendly pages). It’s open. Most importantly, if I want to change it in some way, I can edit every single file.

Now — I say the wp-mobile plug-in is cool, and it is, but there is a big problem with it, and that has to do with, what else, device detection. The plug-in knows you’re browsing from a mobile device because it matches the user-agent string against a list of strings that are hard-coded into the PHP program. If you read my previous post on Device Description Nirvana or are familiar with the work of the MWI Device Descriptions working group, then you’ll know that this issue of device descriptions is a thorny one. In the world of device description nirvana, this plug-in would use an API to query a global database of user agent strings to definitively determine if the incoming request is from a mobile device or not. More importantly, it would be able to use the capabilities of these devices to make intelligent decisions about how best to adapt the page for that particular device. Until that time, however, I wonder if some enterprising soul will at least integrate this plug-in with the WURFL open-source project.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:02 under Blogs, Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, W3C, WURFL

2 Comments