Don’t call me DOM

The Mobile Web Initiative is working hard at fixing interoperability issues, setting foundations for better content adaptation mechanisms, documenting how to work around or avoid the limitations and constraints of the current user experience on mobile devices, which I think are critical to the development of the Mobile Web.

But all these work items are targetting incremental enhancements to the situation, in a step by step approach in which it is sometimes difficult to envision the promises the Mobile Web holds. It's easy to focus only on the contraints, and forget about the great advantages and potential that mobile devices proposes.

So, in this Blue Sky Mobile Web series of articles, I will try and describe some of the mobile-specific applications of Web technologies that could change our lifes in little or big ways. I'm taking a "blue sky" approach, that is to say I'll only focus on what we could wish for, without dealing at all with how we can get there, at least for time being: my goal is first and foremost to have some possible goals to start discussions, and identify which are really relevant. That said, I'll try to stick with technologies mostly available today, but for which we still lack proper integrations and standardisation.

If and when needed, the discussion on how to achieve these goals, with whom and in what timeframe can happen later.

I'll also try to take as much as possible a end user perspective: it is easy to get caught up in developing new technologies for the sake of it, and while my articles will have some technical discussions, I'll try to at least root them in the needs or expectations I perceive from real users.

All the articles in the series will be linked below as they get published. Also, I'll be watching Planet Mobile Web and trying to link to others who would want to "blue-sky" with me...

1. Music Surfing, August 8
2. Connected Personal Information Management, August 21st

I installed the latest version of Opera Mini on my Treo 650 PDA, inspired by all the pretty good feedback I read here and there; unfortunately, I never got it to run properly, as it seems to insist on crashing (and on making my palm reboot) as soon as I’m about to browse anything. Opera Mini 2.0 had some occasional crashs, but I hadn’t had anything nearly as severe as this. I guess I’ll need to downgrade back to 2.0 for now.  Read more... (458 words, 1 image, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

Mike ran a few Web sites through the Mobile Web Best Practices checker, and noted that:

Here’s a few things to pay attention to:  Read more... (579 words, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)

• checking Nokia.mobi yields 50 errors
• Vodafone.mobi has 85
• the .mobi site for dotMobi itself has 5 errors
• the output of Google’s mobile transcoder yields about 18 per page
• the validator seems to fail completely on WML, which I still see being used quite a bit in off-portal independent mobile sites
• the WordPress Mobile plugin output yields 27