Thematic Consistency was introduced in the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, where it suggests you should: “Ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields a thematically coherent experience when accessed from different devices.” The essence of this principle is that regardless of how you access something on the Web, you should get more-or-less the same result.
Obviously, the experience you get on a tiny mobile screen with no keyboard or mouse is going to be quite different from the experience you get on your big desktop computer. So what exactly is a “coherent experience”? To my mind, it is not the kind of One Web story that gets argued about elsewhere. Unfortunately the phrase “One Web” has been so [click title to read more…]
There comes a time when you have to take a break. It is rapidly approaching Christmas and things in the office are winding down for the holidays. The office closes in a couple of hours, but already the staff are playing with a remote control toy car and throwing a ball. As usual, many of them are wandering around with mobile devices as they test the latest code they’ve written, or check out the quality of presentation on the numerous mobile sites we’ve helped create. I begin to wonder if we’re too caught up in the minutia of making mobile technology work to see the big picture.
I hear a lot about Ajax these days, now that it’s making its presence felt in the mobile space. About a year ago, Opera announced Ajax support for mobile devices. Today, there are a few more browsers out there that have the necessary JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest capabilities, and applications making use of these features. (SoonR comes to mind.) The trend is welcome, as it grows the potential for mobile devices.
But what are people expecting? On the PC, the introduction of the Ajax approach created a wow response. The interaction was more responsive. Looking just beneath the surface we see that this is achieved through asynchronous background updates and partial refresh of the currently displayed page.
The request/response delay is [click title to read more…]
After months of procedural red tape, the W3C has announced that the Device Description Working Group has been rechartered to work on the design of the APIs for the DD Repository. I am the Chair of the Group, so I’m really happy that the work is moving into the next phase. Perhaps this will go some way to achieving Dan Appelquist’s DD Nirvana that he recently described. (A better job of describing the DD goal I could not have written myself. Thanks Dan!)
The process of getting this off the ground was quite intense. First, the existing group (let’s call it DD mark I) had to have its charter time extended a few [click title to read more…]
My friends over at Opera have recently released version 3 of Opera Mini. The “mini” application is part of a larger technology that takes content (typically intended for the Web on larger clients like PCs) and reforms it into a narrow (collapsible) strip layout for viewing on mobile devices. For many sites, the experience is quite good, especially if you are in browsing mode and expecting to be able to get everything from the site that you would expect while at your PC. Nevertheless, there is more to a mobile Web site than reformed PC content. Take my favourite news site, the BBC. Their mobile news service on the mobile Web is specifically structured for mobile users. [click title to read more…]