Mobile is NOT Web!
This has been the theme of a lot of mobile-related discussions in the past. Mobile Web is important because it is a means by which applications can make it into the mobile phone. Most people feel that in the current state of mobile web browsing the Mobile Web == the World Wide Web (WWW). Unfortunately, this is not the case. The current Mobile Web suffers from a lot of problems faced by the old WWW and a number of new ones too. Here is a short list of some of the major problems:
- Incompatible user agents. In the WWW world today, there are only less than five (5) major users agents in the market and only two (2) control 95% of the market. In the Mobile Web world, there are much much more. The phones themselves have different screen sizes and supported file/media formats that make it even more difficult for mobile web developers.
- Inconsistent rendering and user agent behavior. Even if there are standards such as WML and xHTML BP and MP, they still don’t render content consistently. Different phones with the same browsers even behave slightly differently.
- Multiple non-compatible standards. This is part of evolution. However, since it is not as easy to change a mobile phone browser compared to a web browser, it will take time before users can change to mobile phones that contain standards compliant mobile browsers.
Of course, there are many more problems and these are just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately, there are some people who consider this problem worth discussing. Here is a nice presentation on how to effectively design for the Mobile Web. The presentation is entitled Designing for Mobile: Bringing Down to Size. This is the first in a multi-part series on building web pages for the mobile web.
However, I sincerely hope that mobile user agent makers take solid steps to standardize. Design solutions are good solutions but they are only temporary. Right now, it is very difficult to get a mobile web site to consistently render on today’s set of mobile phones. To improve mobile web usage, the user agent problems will have to be addressed first. Taking a bit from Internet history, it was only when the HTML 3.2 standard came out and user agents converged into two (2) platforms: Netscape and Microsoft IE that WWW usage grew significantly.
August 30th, 2006 at 12:39 am
[…] Usability. The Mobile Web is rudimentary when it comes to Web site quality and ease of navigation. This first issue attacks the usability aspect of the mobile web. In a previous blog, I bring up and discussed some of the reasons the Mobile Web is limited. In the Internet days, this was also a major problem. Usability was also not that good. The typical early 1990 Internet user was a power user who was typically ex-BBSer, a computer professional or hobbyist. These are people who can work around the usability problems. Then, as usability improved, more and more non-power users began accepting the media. The key was sites, like Yahoo, E-Bay and the other dotcoms, that made the Internet interesting and easy to use for to the common people given the current limits of technology. The same thing is happening in the mobile web now. The typical users today are still the power users. […]