W3C Releases Mobile Web Best Practices: „
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today released the 1.0 version of their Mobile Web Best Practices document. The guidelines offer mobile web developers a consistent set of best practices to apply when creating content for consumption on mobile devices. ‘The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from [mobile web] devices,’ according to the W3C.
In Japan, there are already more mobile web users than PC users, and the rest of the world is catching up. Jupiter Research expects that mobile Web 2.0 revenues will hit $22.4 billion by 2014, with the biggest growth areas in mobile social networking and user generated content.
Developing content across such a wide array of mobile devices and creating a consistent and enjoyable user experience is not an easy task. The W3C hopes that its new mobile best practices guidelines will make it easier for developers to create content and applications for cell phones and other mobile devices.
‘Mobile Web content developers now have stable guidelines and maturing tools to help them create a better mobile Web experience,’ said Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C Mobile Web Activity Lead in a press release. ‘In support of the W3C mission of building One Web, we want to support the developer community by providing tools to enable a great mobile Web user experience.’
The W3C also announced the release of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today as the preferred markup language for the best practices document. ‘Until today, content developers faced an additional challenge: a variety of mobile markup languages to choose from,’ said the W3C. ‘With the publication of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today, the preferred format specification of the Best Practices, there is now a full convergence in mobile markup languages, including those developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).’“
(Via SitePoint Blogs.)