Guidelines for Developing Mobile Web Content

The W3C has published a set of guidelines for developers of content on the web that is designed to play on mobile devices. These guidelines are called Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and are based on extensive surveys of many mobile web designers and developers. The Table of Contents looks like this:

 1 Introduction
    1.1 Purpose of the Document
    1.2 How the Best Practices are Organized
    1.3 Audience
    1.4 Scope
        1.4.1 Phasing
    1.5 Relationship to other Best Practices and recommendations
    1.6 Longevity and Versioning
2 Requirements
    2.1 Presentation Issues
    2.2 Input
    2.3 Bandwidth and Cost
    2.4 User Goals
    2.5 Advertising
    2.6 Device Limitations
    2.7 Advantages
3 Delivery Context
    3.1 One Web
    3.2 Background to Adaptation
    3.3 Adaptation Implementation Model
    3.4 Assumptions about Adaptation
    3.5 Establishing Context
    3.6 Choice of User Experience
    3.7 Default Delivery Context
4 Structure of Best Practice Statements
5 Best Practice Statements
    5.1 Overall Behavior
        5.1.1 Thematic Consistency of Resource Identified by a URI
        5.1.2 Exploit Device Capabilities
        5.1.3 Work around Deficient Implementations
        5.1.4 Testing
    5.2 Navigation and Links
        5.2.1 URIs of Site Entry Points
        5.2.2 Navigation Bar
        5.2.3 Balanced Structure
        5.2.4 Navigation Mechanisms
        5.2.5 Access Keys
        5.2.6 Link Target Identification
        5.2.7 Image Maps
        5.2.8 Refreshing, Redirection and Spawned Windows
        5.2.9 Externally Linked Resources
    5.3 Page Layout and Content
        5.3.1 Page Content
        5.3.2 Page Size
        5.3.3 Scrolling
        5.3.4 Navigation Bars etc. (Extraneous material)
        5.3.5 Graphics
        5.3.6 Color
        5.3.7 Background Images
    5.4 Page Definition
        5.4.1 Title
        5.4.2 Frames
        5.4.3 Structural Elements
        5.4.4 Tables
        5.4.5 Non-Text Items
        5.4.6 Image Size
        5.4.7 Valid Markup
        5.4.8 Measures
        5.4.9 Style Sheets
        5.4.10 Minimize
        5.4.11 Content Types
        5.4.12 Character Encoding
        5.4.13 Error Messages
        5.4.14 Cookies
        5.4.15 Cache Headers
        5.4.16 Fonts
    5.5 User Input
        5.5.1 Input
        5.5.2 Tab Order
        5.5.3 Labels for Form Controls
6 Conformance and mobileOK
    6.1 Classes of Products
    6.2 Extensibility

Appendices

A Sources
B Related Reading
C Acknowledgements
D References
    D.1 MWI References
    D.2 Sources
    D.3 Device Independence
    D.4 Web, Protocols and Languages
    D.5 Other References

As you can see, this document is a must read for anyone starting out to develop mobile web content. Judy Brown, who alerted me to this resource, points to a condensed version of the guidelines, in flipcard format (pdf). (GW)

 Mobile Web Best Practices | mLearnopedia | Judy Brown | 24 October 2009

Tagged as: Mobile Learning, Mobile web, W3C