Category Archives: Mobile Web Standards

Transcoders and HTTPS

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The W3C is still grappling with the issues around content transformation. As I wrote back in August, the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group (BPWG) within the W3C is in the process of formulating a set of Content Transformation Guidelines, defining how web to mobile transcoders should work. The discussions have been extremely heated.  Virtually everyone developing mobile web sites just wants  transcoders to leave their content alone.  There’s considerable distrust in the developer community about the the BPWG, which many … Continue reading →

Lifehacker Mobile

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It looks like the hugely popular Lifehacker.com blog, which recommends time saving technology and techniques to make yourself more productive, now has a mobile site. The announcement is here. There is no mobile specific url, Lifehacker is using browser detection at lifehacker.com to deliver mobile content to phones – at least the ones it recognizes. I played around with feeding Lifehacker a dozen different mobile user-agent headers and Lifehacker delivered mobile content to the majority of them. The Ericsson T68 … Continue reading →

New Mobile Web Development Resources

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A side effect of all the buzz about the mobile web lately is that there are a number of new tools and resources for mobile web developers out on the web. The W3C, the international web standards organization, has a new alpha quality Mobile Web Best Practices Checker. This checker is a tough grader, it seems almost impossible to find a site that passes with zero errors. I checked yeswap.mobi and the checker reported 2 errors. It didn’t like that … Continue reading →

Validation is Your Friend

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It constantly amazes me that so many mobile web sites fail validation. And it’s not just new sites, even some of the biggest names in the industry have mobile pages that have been failing for years when validated by the W3C’s online validator. Probably a third of all the sites I look at don’t validate. The most common problems are: “Naked” ampersands in text and URLs (XML based markup requires that all ampersands be represented by the appropriate html entity). … Continue reading →

going .mobi

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I picked up a couple of .mobi domains for my sites. The mobile edition of this blog is at wapreview.mobi and the yeswap.com portal is now available at yeswap.mobi. Yeswap.com and mp.wapreview.com aren’t going away, however. And, as soon as I mobilize the rest of the Wap Review site you’ll be able to go to wapreview.com with a phone browser and see a mobile site there too. I have mixed feelings about the whole .mobi concept. There’s a lot wrong … Continue reading →

A Must Read for Mobile Web Developers

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Luca Passani has created a great document for anyone doing or considering mobile web development. It’s titled “Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web” and is a concise recipe for building a “one size fits all” mobile site. This is the simplest type of mobile site to create, one which meets the lowest common denominator (LCD) of mobile browser capabilities as opposed to a site that adapts to different devices to give the best possible experience on each. Luca is … Continue reading →