W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 becomes a W3C Recommendation

No, I am not transcribing the W3C News feed, if you also read the last post from some minutes ago. mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0, the specification whose authors are Sean Owen (Google) and Jo Rabin (dotMobi -and before, at Segala-), has been demonstrated by means of a main reference implementation: the W3C mobileOK Checker.

Behind the web front end in that page, there is an open source checker that has been possible thanks to the mobileOK Checker Task Force: Abel Rionda and Miguel García (Fundación CTIC, current co-chairs of the TF), Sean Owen (Google, chair of the TF from its creation in early 2007 until June 2008), Jo Rabin and Ruadhan O'Donoghue (dotMobi), Dominique Hazäel-Masseux and François Daoust (W3C), Roland Gülle (7Val). Ah, and myself.

Basically, the open source checker implements the tests and the tests intend to provide algorithms for those best practices in the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (Basic Guidelines) W3C Recommendation that can be performed by an algorithm without the need for a human expert (that is another battle that I'll write about someday).

This is part of the support of Fundación CTIC to web standards in what regards to mobility since September 2005, when I joined the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group:

• Provision of two implementation reports for the Mobile Web Best Practices W3C Rec:
  
  • "Implementation D" is the wonderful work made by Martín Álvarez Espinar on the web site of Fundamentos Web.
  
  
  • "Implementation E" is the official web site of the City Council of Zaragoza (zaragoza.mobi), whose content transformation engine was created from scratch by Luis Miguel González, Rodrigo García, Julio Argüello and myself. It was the "kernel" of Merkur, the content transformation proxy of Fundación CTIC.


• Implementation of a W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 checker: the subject of this post. By the way, in CTIC we have a great checker called TAW that can validate web sites against WCAG and mobileOK tests. Miguel García, co-chair of the mobileOK Checker Task Force, is the main analyst, designer and developer of this tool.


• Creation of the Device Description Simple API W3C Recommendation.

It has been a lot of work, besides the dozens of projects accomplished in the meantime, but it is good to see that results are visible and -what is more important- useful.

... and Even Better News for the Mobile Web

And how is it that it took so long to the W3C MWBP working group in order to be able to provide its first W3C Recommendation? The Mobile Web Best Practices have been waiting for months for XHTML Basic 1.1 to be a W3C Rec, because it was defined as the mark-up language of reference for the Default Delivery Context define in the document.

Was it so important to wait for it? Yes, XHTML Basic 1.1 is the mark-up language jointly supported by both W3C and the OMA from now and on in order to be the hypertext language of reference in mobile devices. So no more XHTML Basic vs XHTML Mobile Profile (well, they shall be taken into account for a few years as old devices disappear and new devices start including browsers supporting XHTML Basic 1.1). It is great that, in the next future, the OMA and W3C speak the same (hypertextual) language.

Good news for the mobile web

I am sure I am being the last one to spread the word, but I am proud to say that the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (Basic Guidelines) have become -two days ago- a W3C Recommendation. The proud is due to the fact that this document has been developed by the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group, under the umbrella of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. I joined that group in September 2005 by attending the Face-to-Face meeting in Rome, some months after its birth in June 2005. I must say that in my first months within the working group I felt like fish out of the water. Little by little, I managed to understand the whole problem (it is easy to understand the problem of the web in mobile devices, in general; I am talking about understanding certain subtleties). Then, more people at work started understanding it too and participating in the group and we managed to even provide Reference Implementations of the Best Practices (i.e., web sites following the BPs), like zaragoza.mobi or the web site of Fundamentos Web. We have managed to do even more stuff related to all the efforts within the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, but these are stories yet to be told (some of them really soon) as the final version of new documents come out to the public.