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By Peter V. Mikhalenko July 18, 2006, 6:10pm PDT The principal objective ofrecently issued working draft guidelines on Mobile Web by theW3C is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from mobiledevices. These recommendations are built on some of the same concepts describedby the Device Independence principles. The Mobile Web guidelines have somepresentations issues including input and output capacity, bandwidth and costfor end-users requirements, delivery context, etc. This document coversbest practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. It is importantthat all recommendations refer to deliveredcontent and not to the processes by which it is created, nor to the devices oruser agents to which it is delivered. Readers are expected to be familiar withWeb technologies such as Web servers and HTTP.
Scope of recommendations
Most of differences between fixed and mobile userexperience are fall in these categories: Types of content; Network and device capabilities; Context in which the content is received (e.g., sitting at a desk vs. sitting on a bus). An example of the content issues involved is a large bitmap. The bitmap may be unsuitable for use on a mobile device and it would need to be resized or cropped, while maintaining the relevant information. Examples of device and access network capabilities that need to be considered because ofpossible technical, ergonomic or economic implications for a mobile userinclude: Bandwidth - Basic cellular radio access often offers lower bandwidth than a fixed connection;
Battery -Battery capacity is very constrained in mobile devices - certain activities tend to increase power consumption and shorten battery life; Capabilities - like screen size, memory size, etc.; Cost -Cellular network connectivity is commonly charged per data volume; Input -Mobile device input capabilities tend to differ, but are usually more constrained than in desktop terminals; Memory -Significantly less working memory and storage is available on mobile devices than in desktop terminals; Processing power -Significantly less processing power is available on mobile devices than in desktop terminals; Text input -Text input tends to be very slow and cumbersome on a mobile device;
Input
Mobile device inputis often difficult when compared with use of a desktop device equipped with akeyboard. Mobile devices often have only a very limited keypad, with smallkeys, and there is frequently no pointing device. One of the difficulties ofthe mobile Web is that URLs are very difficult to type. Lengthy URLs and thosethat contain a lot of punctuation are particularly difficult to type correctly.Because of the limitations of screen and input, forms are hard to fill in. Thisis because navigation between fields may not occur in the expected order andbecause of the difficulty in typing into the fields. While many moderndevices provide back buttons, some do not, and in some cases, where backfunctionality exists, users may not know how to invoke it. This means that itis often very hard to recover from errors, broken links and so on.
User goals
Mobile userstypically have different interests to users of fixed or desktop devices. Theyare likely to have
more immediate and goal-directed intentions than desktop Webusers. Their intentions are often to find out specific pieces of informationthat are relevant to their context. An example of such a goal-directedapplication might be the user requiring specific information about schedulesfor a journey they are currently undertaking. Equally,mobile users are typically less interested in lengthy documents or in browsing.The ergonomics of the device are frequently unsuitable for reading lengthydocuments, and users will often only access such information from mobiledevices as a last resort, because more convenient access is not available.
Advertising
Developers ofcommercial Web sites should note that different commercial models are often atwork when the Web is accessed from mobile devices as compared with desktopdevices. For example, some mechanisms that are commonly used for presentationof advertising material do not work well on small devices and are thereforecontrary to the Best Practice recommendations.
Delivery context
It is likely thatapplication designers and service providers will wish to provide the bestpossible experience in the context in which their service has the most appeal.However, while services may be most appropriately experienced in one context oranother, it is considered best practice to provide as reasonable experience asis possible given device limitations and not to exclude access from anyparticular class of device, except where this is necessary because of devicelimitations. The widely varyingcharacteristics of mobile devices can make it difficult for a Web site toprovide an acceptable user experience across a significant range of devices.For example different devices support different markup features and differentscreen sizes may demand different sized images. Consequently, it is very commonwhen delivering content to mobile devices to vary the details of the markup,format of images, image sizes, color depths, and so onto suit the characteristics of the device in question. The process of alteringcontent to enhance the user experience on particular devices is referred to as Content Adaptation. Providing variationson the user experience that are appropriate in different cases requires thecontent provider to know a significant amount about the characteristics of thedevice, the properties of the browser in use and the transparency of thenetwork connection to the device. For simple sites that present an interfacewhich is similar across a broad range of contexts the need for such informationis diminished when compared with a sophisticated site that has an optimizednavigation structure, presents different size images or carries out otheradaptations to suit the particular delivery context. There are several methodsby which a content provider can discover information about the deliverycontext, such as CC/PP, UAPROF, CSS Media Queries and various outputs of the Device Independence WorkingGroup. Since mobile deviceshave such a wide range of differences in their properties, the Best PracticesWorking Group has defined a Default Delivery Context: Screen width: minimum of 120 pixels; Markup language: XHTML Basic Profile(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/); Character encoding: UTF-8(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3629.txt); Image formats supported, at least: JPEG, GIF 89a (non-interlaced, non-transparent, non-animated); Maximum page size: 20 Kb; Color range: "Web-safe", i.e. red/green/blue components chosen only from the values 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255; Style sheet support: External CSS Level 1(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1)
However some content (such as maps and other images) cannot be displayed without secondary scrolling. Do not use graphics for spacing. The popular mechanism of using a 1 pixel graphic for absolute positioning does not work on a variety of screens. When using background images make sure that content remains readable on the device. Page definition -Provide a short but descriptive page title. The device may use the page title as the default label for bookmarks. Again, space may be limited, so use it to help identify the content and not for other purposes. Do not use frames. Many mobile devices do not support frames. In addition, frames are recognized as being generally problematic (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xframes/#s_intro(http://www.w3.org/TR/xframes/#s_intro) for a discussion of problems with frames). Do not use tables unless the device is known to support them. Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element. Actually page definition requirements include many others, such as encoding, scripts, cookies, fonts, styles etc. The general principle: the simpler the better. User input - Provide pre-selected default values where possible. Keep the number of keystrokes to a minimum. Label all form controls appropriately and explicitly associate labels with form controls. Position labels so they lay out properly in relation to the form controls they refer to.