Measuring the Effects of Operator Transcoders
The issue of mobile-operator transcoders on the mobile web has been hugely controversial. For many iPhone and Android phone owners the negative effects of the transcoders are no longer visible and the issue has dropped off the radar, but they remain a serious problem for those using lower-end devices. more...
Location, Location, Location
Location based services (LBS) has been a buzz word and a hype since birth of mobile services. I'm not saying that it is a failure! more...
Kind of a "sunshine transcoder story"
I guess many of you have been following discussions on various attempts by network operators to transcode desktop web sites and squeeze them on to a mobile device, without respecting the intentions of content owners. The case I'll be talking about is the TeliaSonera case, and their "SurfOpen" service. First time around, the launch caused an uprising among the content owners forcing TeliaSonera to go offline with SurfOpen. Now SurfOpen is launched again with a more reasonable approach. more...
Character Encoding Issues and the Mobile Web
Character encoding, the binary representation underlying every symbol in documents delivered to mobile devices, is often treated as an afterthought in mobile Web development. Many developers simply rely upon ISO-8859-1; not a bad choice, as this encoding efficiently supports all important Western European languages, has long been available in the mobile and fixed Internet, is widespread among low-end phones, and is the default encoding in the HTTP standard. more...
News from W3C: Best Practices, mobileOK and Content Transformation Guidelines Progress
Last week, W3C announced the final step of approval of the Mobile Web Best Practices as a W3C Recommendation. It's taken quite a while for it to progress to this point, mainly because it had a dependency on HTML Basic 1.1 the version of XHTML that unifies OMA XHTML-MP and W3C work. more...
X-Device-User-Agent header appearing in requests
One good thing about open standards is that anyone can pick them up and implement them. This means that everyone will benefit from this as the standardization will open new opportunities for everything. If there is one thing that we need in the mobile space, that is standardization. more...
Comparison of CSS 2.1, CSS MP, WCSS and CSS Level 1
This tables summarizes the differences between the different flavours of CSS that are in use and is a useful reference for developers who are making the transition from from PC web design to mobile web design. Version 0.9 (Draft), 29 Jan 2007 Jo Rabin Some references are works in progress and are subject to change more...
Comparison of XHTML Mobile Profile and XHTML Basic
This article describes the differences between some different flavours of XHTML. The table covers XHTML Mobile Profile and XHTML Basic, and some different versions of each. Version 1.2 (update), 29 Jan 2007 more...
mobileOK Basic - it has teeth!
The W3C announced today the second public draft of the mobileOK test document (the first of mobileOK Basic as it is now known). The document is has changed a lot since the version of the 12th July and I thought I'd take some time to look at some of the ways in which it has changed and to give some personal thoughts about its significance to the development of the Mobile Web. more...
Best Practices becomes Proposed Recommendation
The W3C announced yesterday that the Mobile Web Best Practices had become a Proposed Recommendation. This means it has passed a number of important milestones of review by members of the Working Group that created it, members of the W3C and the public. There's one more step to go before it becomes a full recommendation. more...
