An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices
The Online Course: An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices kicked off today and we are one of the participants – you just can’t learn the best practices of mobile web development anywhere else than from W3C! We anticipate it’s going to be a very busy 8 weeks starts from today as we will be putting all our focus on this course, and learn as much as we can from this rare opportunity.
We are anxious and exciting as a kid who is just entering the kindergarten for the first time!
Same old problem, new challenge and new approach for the mobile web
Here is a little secret, we have been working on an iPhone/iPod, and now the iPad optimized Magento theme, the challenge is great and the progress has been slow. We set our bar high, the default iPhone theme provided by Varien isn’t something we want to deliver quality wise; we signed up the Mobile Web Best Practices course thinking that we were going to learn all the tips and secrets about developing mobile web for iPhone, iPod and iPad. Alas!, reality crashes our fanciness, to learn the “Mobile Web Best Practices” we realized we first need to learn the basic and be fully recognizing that the Mobile Web isn’t just iPhone, iPod and iPad, and that there are Nokia, Sony Erisson, BlackBerry and so on and they don’t use Safari mini for web browsing devices, and these are the phones/devices that dominate the main mobile web market in global scale.
First week we will be learning not to use Pop-up, frame, table layout and image maps, and do the assignment without any of these used in the site—we never ever use any of them in hundred of sites we built in the past 5 years for that we learned to build web site after we saw the CSS Zen Garden and read the Designing with Web Standards. Despite we never use them and will never do, re-examining why these methods are evilly bad and the obstacles they pose for the mobile web more than the desktop browsing devices does give us a new refreshing perspective which really pull us back to reality, and remind us why we started building websites to begin with, that is, to help make the web a better, accessible and usable place with a tiny drop of our effort.
One a side note, we were pleasantly surprised that Opera Mini 5 Simulator renders quite similar to iPhone/iPod in the sense of “Safari Mini” that shrinks the entire web page to the given width in the mobile devices. Did it always this way or Opera changed how Opera Mini work after Apple launched its first iPhone?