How well does your web page work on a mobile phone?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 02:24

Business IT - Technology

It's now very easy to answer that question. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has launched an online content checker designed to verify whether content on mobile web sites meets new standards for this type of content.

W3C is inviting developers to try the W3C mobileOK checker which is based on the just released mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 Recommendation standard.

To use it, you simply enter the URL of the web page you want to check on the W3C mobileOK checker web page and the checker will display a report showing any compliance problems (we have to admit that iTWire's mobile web page http://mobile.itwire.com/ does not score too well, but we're working on it).

W3C director, Tim Berners-Lee, said: "The new checker builds on the suite of quality assurance tools offered by W3C to help authors and authoring tool developers create clean content [and] offers a number of benefits to authors and users alike." He added: "The mobileOK checker does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time. Your mobile audience will thank you each time you improve your score."

Sites that have already been verified as "mobileOK' include the Google search engine and the mobile version of the Wikipedia Web site and, W3C says, a few tools are already available that generate mobileOK content, such as Wordpress' mobile plugin. It "anticipates that the tool will make it easier for authoring tool developers in particular "to make significant strides towards reaching the global mobile community."

According to W3C, The mobileOK checker makes use of the popular W3C validator to help improve content quality. In addition to the mobile-friendliness score it offers tips for meeting the needs of people on the go.

It has been developed as an open source project, driven by the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group which includes leaders from the mobile industry and Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) sponsors.

Development of the checker has been supported under the MobiWeb2.0 project, part of the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme, and W3C says this support will enable it to continue to actively develop the checker until at least the end of 2009.