Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
W3C provides guidelines for designing mobile sites
Interestingly this is not about designing for specifically WAP but for HTML and full XHTML, yet with advise for how to make content fit on small displays. As noted here, browsers that just do narrow rendering (or small screen rendering) often show the horisontal and vertical menus first, and way down on the page is the actual content that you want to see. Some browsers, including Opera Mini, try to find the relevant text, but often fails as there is nothing in the content that says what is a menu etc and what is "real" content.
As I've pointed out earlier, it's best if mobile-adapted sites use the exact same URL as the normal web site, yet adapt dynamically to the phone's capabilities. That way users don't have to learn different URLs, and for some devices (like smartphones) the normal web site might actually work fine without adaptations. It's also crucial that URLs are kept as short as possible. Ideally all web sites should have a "send SMS with a link to this site" button, yet it could become costly for the service providers.
Wireless firms agree on rules for mobile Web sites - Yahoo! News
W3C: How to design for mobile devices | InfoWorld | News | 2006-06-27 | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
W3C: Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
