The W3C is meeting to form a potential "Mobile Web Initiative" to make the web more mobile friendly. Ideas include best practices and cracking down on bad coders.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for defining such important web standards as XHTML, XML, and SVG, is gathering in Barcelona, Spain to figure out how to best ensure that all of their mobile-friendly standards are actually used.
The meeting deliberately coincides with a meeting of the Open Mobile Alliance, and the two groups will be working together to try to solve the various problems plaguing mobile web access today. In particular, the vast majority of web sites today are designed for desktop PCs with big screens, high resolutions, and broadband connections, and those pages simply do not work well if at all on 2" screens over a 20 kbps connection. While the W3C has developed a series of standards specifically designed to make mobile web development easier, such as XHTML Basic, SVG Tiny, and SMIL Basic, uptake has been slow and that still doesn't solve the problem of desktop-targeted pages that don't degrade gracefully.
The W3C has for a long time offered free validators for web authors as well as a self-enforcing "valid XHTML" labeling program, but it is talking about getting stricter. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss various ways to address the lack of conformance that has made the desktop-targeted web a mass of non-conformant "tag soup" rather than valid, structured pages and to ensure that a similar fate doesn't befall the mobile web.
Ideas that have been floated so far include developing best practices documents to guide web developers along in learning how to use standards properly as well as cracking down on sites that claim to be spec-compliant but aren't. Also under consideration is a marketing component as well as active training, both intended to get new web developers started on the right track before they get drawn into "tag soup" habits.
The conference is sponsored by W3C members HP, Orange, Vodafone, and Volantis. Other participating companies, who are required to submit position papers (in valid XHTML, of course), include Adobe, Canon, France Telecom, HP, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave, Opera, Oracle, Orange, PalmSource, RIM, Sony Ericsson, Sun, T-Mobile, and Yahoo.
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