Mobile Web Best Practices

The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone via the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet. The first commercial launch of a mobile-specific browser-based web service was in 1999 in Japan when i-mode was launched by NTT DoCoMo.

Since the first ringing tone was sold on the mobile phone, the mobile has emerged as the seventh of the mass media.

Technical Overview

The Mobile Web primarily utilises lightweight pages written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limitations by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HTML commonly found on the desktop Web.

Due to a huge variety of mobile phone platforms and standards there can be only a general list of recommendations and best practices.

The Mobile Web Application Best Practices, the next generation of guidelines developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, combines the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into one set of best practices, regarded as essential by the participants of the Working Group.

While the document is quite lengthy a free-standing summary is also availbale.

The recommendations are in part derived from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG guidelines are supplementary to the Mobile Web Best Practices, whose scope is limited to matters that have a specific mobile relevance.

W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0

mobileOK Basic is a scheme for assessing whether Web resources (Web content) can be delivered in a manner that is conformant with Mobile Web Best Practices to a simple and largely hypothetical mobile user agent, the Default Delivery Context. Based on that a mobileOK Checker tool was created.

Other Guidelines

Mobile development documentation is available from Microsoft, Apple, Android, Nokia and many others.

Mobile Web resources

Updated: May 10, 2011