Speaking at the Mobile Internet World conference in Boston, Tim Berners-Lee described the mobile initiative at W3C, which he heads, had announced a new W3C developer tool for testing website/mobile device compatibility. An article from Technology Review reports Sir Tim’s speech:
The overarching goal of the initiative, according to Berners-Lee, is to keep content available regardless of the devices available to a person. “I like being able to choose my hardware separately from choosing my software, and separately from choosing my content,” Berners-Lee said at the conference. There needs to be just one Web, he explained, and it needs to work on phones.
Many websites are far from Berners-Lee’s vision. Some developers don’t have websites that work with mobile devices and don’t make mobile versions of their sites, seeing this as an added technical headache. For developers who do want their websites to be available everywhere, a common practice is to build special versions of sites for mobile devices, with pared-down features and, sometimes, content.
In some parts of the world, the mobile phone is the primary way that people access the Internet, and content should be available to those people as much as it is to people using a desktop computer. The system doesn’t work well for those in wealthier nations, either. Users with devices such as the iPhone want to be able to access sites from their mobile device at the full capability that the iPhone has, says Matt Womer, the W3C’s mobile-Web-initiative lead for North America. Users don’t want to see a pared-down site.
On the other hand, Womer notes that mobile-device users shouldn’t be forced to download large images or be redirected to several different pages, since users pay by the kilobyte.
via Roland Piquepaille at Smart Mobs
Technorati Tags: one_web, mobile, w3c, berners_lee
