Oh Mobi Content, Why Art Thou So Pesky

Spending a lot of time away from the office lately? Planning to impress with yer spanking new iPhone?

Well there’s good news for you dear reader. The W3C established Mobile Web Initiative has got you and all the standards you can swallow in mind. And they aim to lay plans both for bridging and filling the gaps between our disparate devices.

Mobile Web Initiative

The MWI’s mission in life is to provide a set of recommendations and guidelines for key players in the mobile production chain on how to best support the web on mobile platforms. The MWI receives sponsorship from a number of companies and groups including big names like Nokia, Ericson, HP, Vodafone and a gaggle of others. They know that mobile web access is still not all it’s cracked up to be — its still suffering greatly from usability and interoperability issues. But they have a plan.

The group has published several documents including the following:

• Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 - Basic Guidelines
• MobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
• Content Transformation Landscape 1.0

There are still many companies out there today that don’t offer a version of their website for the mobile browser. So what do mobile network operators do? Well they use proxies to transform the web content for you so you can see in your mobile browser.

Content Transformation Landscape

Whoa, what are content transform proxies, you say? Proxies are an intermediary inserted into the communications path between your mobile browser and the originating server (website). Essentially they pretend to be a browser getting the content and then convert the content into a readable format before sending to your mobile device. Nifty, eh?

Transformations can include things like correcting character encoding, reformatting and resizing images, changing layouts and page segmentation and multi step JavaScript transaction emulation. In addition, they can add or remove content from a page.

The MWI has a dedicated task force working on the subject of Content Transformation and they have just released their first working document on it called Content Transformation Landscape 1.0. It discusses the benefits and issues related to transformation proxies and a set of guidelines for the mobile production world to use these proxies.

But what if I have a mobile version of my website? There are three types of parties affected by these “mobile transformations”:

1. a website that has no mobile version available
2. a website that blocks mobile viewing (they send an HTTP error code or a message back to the mobile when a page on their site is requested)
3. a website that does have a mobile version available (the company has designed a mobile version of their site)

Content Transformation Advantages

The advantages of content transformation are somewhat obvious:

1. It enables a mobile browser to view any website regardless of whether that site’s company has created a version of it for the mobile community
2. It eases the work of site designers, reducing or eliminating their requirement to design a mobile version as these proxies can do this for them.

Content Presentation Issues

But, as you'd expect, it’s not all glory and greatness. While transformation proxies greatly help those unfortunates who don’t already have mobile access, they can wreak havoc for a company that has gone through great effort to design a mobile version of their site.

Oh Mobi Content, Why Art Thou So Pesky

Spending a lot of time away from the office lately? Planning to impress with yer spanking new iPhone? \n\nWell there’s good news for you dear reader. The W3C established Mobile Web Initiative has got you and all the standards you can swallow in mind. And they aim to lay plans both for bridging and filling the gaps between our disparate devices.

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