They've been trying for several years to assemble and issue Internet standards for mobile devices. Now, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) wants to try getting people to use them for a change, beginning two days worth of meetings November 18 to draw up a Mobile Web Initiative to stimulate adopting and conforming to the consortium's assortment of mobile recommendations.
"Even though many of today's mobile phones include Web browsers, accessing the Web from a mobile device has not become as popular as expected," the W3C said advancing the two-day conference. "Users often find that their favorite Web sites are not accessible or not as easy to use on their mobile phone as on their desktop device. Content providers sometimes are not able to build Web sites that work well on all types and configurations of mobile phones offering Web access."
The W3C and the Open Mobile Alliance have been trying to unravel the difficulty they say exists when people try to get pages and applications designed for desktop machines to work on small wireless devices. The OMA, in fact, is meeting at the same time as the W3C conference.
The two groups in August published a memorandum of understanding on sharing technical information for mobile device standards. That memorandum addressed various definitions and issues like content sharing and confidential information sharing between the two groups as they work, together and separately, to resolve the mobile standards issue.
Among other things the W3C wants to resolve are getting people to work with common standards when it comes to things like multimodal interaction, device independence, and multimedia messaging.
"This will be more than a working group," said W3C interaction domain chief Philipp Hoschka about the W3C conference. "It will be several groups that will do things a bit differently than what working groups typically do. They will talk about best practices; there will be a marketing and training component, which is something that we've never done. Potentially we will also do conformance testing and validation. We would like to start getting stricter about standards conformance."
