Firm in its resolve that more and more users will access the Internet with
mobile devices, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) said it is considering a
new effort to make Web access on a mobile device as easy it is on a personal
computer.
W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly said the W3C Mobile Web Initiative will be the
central conversation piece at a workshop on Nov. 18 and 19 in Barcelona,
Spain.
The informal meeting, sponsored by HP, Orange, Vodafone and
Volantis, will include more than 40 participants who will hold forth on how
to remove the constraints of accessing the Web with different handheld
devices.
Accessing the Web via most personal digital assistants, smartphones or
wireless pagers has been a challenging confluence of button pushing.
Moreover, when users do push the right buttons to access a Web site or
download a music video, the rendering of the content is often poor because
of the small screen.
For example, Web sites are either not accessible or not easy to navigate on
mobile phones and content providers have a hard time building Web sites that
work well on all types and configurations of Web-enabled mobile phones.
Accessing the Internet in cars is another focus area.
This work is important because consumers and corporate employees are
increasingly using mobile gadgets to transfer money or send, receive or
download timetables, product information and e-mail.
The idea behind the Mobile Web Initiative in a way is testing the water for a
possible new major Web initiative workshop out of the W3C, Daly told
internetnews.com.
The W3C has conducted a variety of mobile-oriented
workshops that were broader in focus, but this is the one where the
attendees will do a gut-check on what they’ve accomplished so far.
“What’s left to do to make this a thriving environment for mobile users
that’s going to give them the convenience, the pleasure and the productivity
that they want out of the Web,” Daly said.
Daly said work on accessing the Web from mobile gadgets began in 1998,
spurred on by the WAP Forum, whose early approach to
mobilizing Web access failed. Its model included rewriting the protocol
stack without using the Internet.
WAP is now the Open Mobile Alliance, and it will collocate the mobile workshop with
the W3C in Spain. OMA employs the IP stack, and this past summer, W3C and OMA agreed
to collaborate on specs for mobile data services.
The W3C, meanwhile, has focused on mobile Web access with such schemas as the
Voice Browser, which yielded Voice XML 2.0. This led to a suite of
specs, such as the Speech Interface Framework, pieces of which are still in
development.
