W3C issues mobile guidelines

By Steve Malone

Posted on 28 Jun 2006 at 10:28

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued a 'candidate recommendation' for a set of basic guidelines for Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0. The document is backed by over 30 organisations, including many of the companies involved in the development of the Internet on mobile devices - AOL, the International Webmasters Association / HTML Writers Guild (IWA-HWG), Internet Content Rating Association, Microsoft, Vodafone, Nokia, Google, dotMobi and France Telecom, among others.

Following the founding principles of the World Wide Web, the document attempts to provide HTML coders with a set of basic rules so that web pages can be viewed on as diverse a set of mobile platforms as possible, including mobile phones.

However, as the Web was originally designed for desktop computers, coding for mobile devices provides a new set of challenges. The most obvious problem being that the average display on a mobile device is much smaller than that of the standard desktop or notebook computer. There are also issues with user input and interaction and bandwidth all of which need to be addressed.

Because the standard aspires to 'one Web' that is, pages should as far as possible be device independent, the document sets some basic standards for a web page delivered to a mobile device. These include the ability to be seen on a 120pixel wide screen as a minimum, JPG and GIF as the accepted graphics formats, a maximum page weight of 20K and XHTML - Basic Profile, External CSS Level 1 support and HTTP 1.0 or 1.1.

The document also provides a lot of practical advice such as not using cookies, keeping URLs short and steering clear of pop-ups and auto refreshing pages as many devices cannot support more than one window.

The W3C also plans to provide a guidelines checker to test results and a wiki to provide a forum for issues and suggestions to improve the guidelines in the future.

The Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 is available at the W3C web site.