FOWA Notes: The Future of Mobile Web Apps - Daniel Appelquist | Comments (2)
Posted in Events on 21st February 2007, 5:02 pm by Stuart
Vodafone’s work in standards.
Leader of development of open standards
Key player in development of GSM and 3G
Proponent of open standards on the web
Working to develop a standard for rich mobile UI
Do users want the web on their mobiles?
.. (show of hands)
Yes people do want to use the mobile web
Penetration of mobile phones is quite strong. More web enabled phones than pcs.
People looking up aubergine recipes. A user uses the mobile web to find parts for trashed ferraris.
W3C Mobile web initiative.
Workshop to decide whether to start something inside of the W3c around mobile.
Need for best practices.
Need for good device descriptions, good info on the server side as to the capabilities of the client.
Device descriptions working group
Best Practivce detail:
Design for one web
Rely on web standards
stay away from known hazards
Be cautious of device limitations
limited bandwidth
cookies
small screen
optimise navigation
for small scren
Check graphics and colours
Keep it small
bandwidth
Use the network sparingly
Help and guide user input
form features
Think of users on the go
IA will be different from someone sitting at their desk
Thematic consistency
Same content different context per device
Valid markup
Use stylesheets for presentation unless you know they’re not supported.
Don’t rely on cookies
Don’t rely on embedded objects or scripts.
http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/BPWG/techs/
.mobi is a TLD to denote a mobile friendly site.
.mobi has put a lot of effort into best practices/standards.
Mobile 2.0
Transition of mobile apps to an internet model.
Mobile web and connected applications
User Choice
leveraging open standards
more interactive mobile apps running in the browser
Mobile 2.0 1 day event run NOv 2006
Bundesliga - an app launched recently
has embedded video, football scores.
Scalable UI using SVGT
SVG almost a dirty word on the web. But great for mobile. There’s no reason why this same app couldn’t work in a normal browser with a plugin.
The vision is instead of an app this is something that could be manifested within the mobile browser.
Soonr
Works within Opera
Opera is probably the most progressive mobile browser manufacturer.
Slide show within the browser.
Allows you to access the data on your desktop. Via the web.
Mobile Ajax makes it work. Engineers worked closely with opera.
The Future.
SVG based apps become fully integrated into the browser context.
…
WICD
“wicked”
SVG xHTML CSS DOM
User agent behaviour
Baseline for rich media web app development on the mobile platform.
New W3C standards
Web APIs working group
http://www.w3.org/2006/webapi/
Web apps Formats working group
http://www.w3.org/2006/appformats
Mobile Widgets
iPhone
Widget displays very targetted information.
opera widgets
Yahoo! widgets
Apple dashboard
MS gadgets
XBL
XML binding language
Better separation of content and behaviour
Mobile Ajax Workshop
Joint workshop between w3c and Open Ajax Alliance
focus on AJax ddev on the mobile platform
Date Early June.
BetaVine
Vodafone R&D dev community
Place for early adopters
http://www.vodafonebetavine.net
Dan’s blog: www.torgo.com/blog
SVG a dirty word? Many people think otherwise, look at http://svg.startpagina.nl for an overview.
Use a plug-in? Just use a browser other(=better) than IE does the trick out of the box more and more often (implementations are partial, but improving quickly
hi, great stuff going on there! do you have any details about the “Joint workshop between w3c and Open Ajax Alliance”? any contact or web address would be interesting. thanks a lot!