Features

Mobilizing Our Content with the W3C Mobile Web Initiative

March 21, 2011

By Neil Perlin | Fellow

The mobile Web seems to have as many lives as a cat—a good thing considering how often the mobile market has died. (Remember iMode, HDML, and cHTML?) Yet mobile keeps coming back because it offers freedom. As the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) put it, “No longer do you have to remember to do something on the Web when you get back to your computer. You can do it immediately, within the context that made you want to use the Web in the first place.”

Despite years of false starts like cHTML and HDML, and hype that never seemed to work out in practice, mobile is finally exploding (with Apple deserving the credit for creating the products that finally broke open the mass market). According to the 7 April 2010 issue of Information Week (http://tinyurl.com/2783f44), “45.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones at the end of February, up 21% from the previous three months. Smartphones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile phone market, which comprised 234 million subscribers in the U.S. at the end of February.” This survey didn’t cover tablets (e.g., iPads), so consider that “in 2007, the … iPhone took 73 days to cross the million mark. The iPad managed the same feat in just 28 days, about 2½ times as fast as the first iPhone did … [and these] numbers account only for U.S. customers,” according to http://tinyurl.com/2atev28.

How does this affect technical communicators?

Despite the increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices, they’re still rarely seen as a medium for technical communication. I’ve been asking conference audiences for years if anyone was creating or planning to create content for distribution on mobile devices. The response has been miniscule. But a smartphone is simply a display device, like a PC, albeit one whose market is growing quickly. The 6 December 2010 issue of Computerworld (http://preview.tinyurl.com/2af745x) predicts that sales of smartphones and tablets, like the iPad, will overtake those of PCs. We have to take such predictions with a grain of salt, but sales of mobile devices are rising. Our audiences are adopting these devices. Our online help and documentation may have to go to these devices as well. Can we afford to ignore this huge new market for our work?

When I discuss the mobile market, people often note that the explosive growth of the smartphone app market means that every imaginable app has been created. That’s true for mass market apps. Consider vertical and in-house apps or online documentation needs that may be largely untouched and that may represent significant business opportunities. Are there apps or documentation needs within your company that could be mobilized?

The Problem

As with any new technology with many different devices, screen sizes, operating systems, processors, and so on, confusing or nonexistent standards and best practices for development and authoring make it hard to cost-effectively create usable content that works on multiple devices. The result? Niche markets or outright failure, which largely describes the history of mobile in North America through the early 2000s.

Around 2003, the W3C decided that the failures of the mobile market were due in part to a lack of standards. Its response was to launch the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) in 2004. The MWI’s home page is www.w3.org/Mobile/; there’s a write-up of the initial MWI meeting in 2004 at www.w3.org/2004/09/mwi-workshop-cfp.html.

The Mobile Web Initiative (MWI)—The Solution, In Part

After seven years of evolution, which continues today, the MWI is not one standard but a group of standards and suggested best practices for development and authoring. The emphasis is the Web, not surprising given the W3C’s focus. But a lot of the MWI also applies to technical communication, especially as the latter becomes increasingly Web-driven. What follows is my take on the most useful parts of the MWI for technical communicators, starting on the authoring side:

  • Mobile Web Best Practices (www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-mobile-bp-20080729/)—This document lists 60 recommendations for designing content and using technologies like CSS (such as not using popups or frames, not using tables for layout, and switching to relative rather than absolute units in CSSs). Again, the focus is on the Web; the introduction states that what follows is “a series of recommendations designed to improve the user experience of the Web on mobile devices” (emphasis added). However, many of the recommendations easily apply to online help and documentation. (In Q3 2010, I began a multi-part blog post discussing how many of the recommendations could be applied specifically to technical communication. Those posts are available at www.hyperword.blogspot.com/.)

  • Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Flipcards (www.w3.org/2007/02/mwbp_flip_cards.html)—The Mobile Web Best Practices document is useful but, at 84 pages, not a quick reference. One alternative is the flipcards that summarize the best practices in a set of quick rules without all of the supporting detail.

  • Mobile Web Application Best Practices (www.w3.org/TR/mwabp/)—This document is similar to the Mobile Web Best Practices document but focuses on programming rather than content development and presentation. If you’re not a programmer, much of this document may be irrelevant, but it may provoke some ideas about other technologies available for mobile devices, like geolocation, that you might use in conjunction with your online help or documentation. (Some years ago, albeit in a very different context, I suggested that technical communicators working for museums might use location to determine which Web pages displayed as visitors moved around a museum.)

  • Mobile Web Application Best Practices Cards (www.w3.org/2010/09/MWABP/)—Like the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Flipcards mentioned above, these cards summarize the Mobile Web Application Best Practices document.

In addition to this authoring-oriented material, the MWI page also links to other programming-oriented resources. If you’re a technical communicator, these resources may initially seem irrelevant. However, new versions of familiar authoring tools like Flare and RoboHelp are taking technical communicators deeper and deeper into the programming aspects of mobile. And new mobile authoring tools like various vendors’ mobile SDKs (software development kits) and GUI mobile SDKs like Google Application Inventor (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/) and Mobiflex (www.mobiflex.me/) let technical communicators move further into development, so it’s good to be acquainted with the technical issues. Some of the most useful of these resources include:

  • W3C MobileOK Checker (http://validator.w3.org/mobile/)—This tool is a “validator” that examines a Web page based on the criteria for adherence to the W3C’s MobileOK Basic Tests 1.0, described in a document available at www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/. In other words, the checker is examining the page’s adherence to the machine-testable recommendations in the Mobile Web Best Practices document mentioned earlier, in order for the developer to claim compliance with the W3C MobileOK Basic standard. You may not care whether your pages meet this standard, but this validator is still a useful way to see whether your Web page is usable in general, with the W3C Best Practice standards simply providing a baseline.

  • Markup Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org/)—This tool is a validator that ensures that your code conforms to XHTML Basic or XHTML MP. This may be important depending on what mobile devices you plan to support.

  • CSS Validation Service (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/)—This tool is a validator that ensures that your code conforms to a specific version of the CSS standard. This may also be important depending on what mobile devices you plan to support.

  • Mobile Web Test Harness (www.w3.org/2007/03/mth/results)—This lists the mobile web browsers supported by mobile Web technologies, focusing (for our purposes) on CSS standards and encoding. Much of the content is aimed at programmers, but just scanning the listings of browsers and devices should be enough to push you toward planning and developing standards before starting development of any mobile content.

  • Planet Mobile Web (www.w3.org/Mobile/planet)—This is a link to an aggregator of blog posts relating to mobile and covers a wide range of topics. If nothing else, it’s a quick way to get a sense of the breadth of the mobile world.

The title of this section noted that the MWI was the solution to the standards issue in part. Where technical communicators are concerned, the solution has two issues:

  • The MWI assumes extensive background knowledge that may be new to technical communicators. For example, we tend to refer to “CSS” as one generic technical standard but, as you’ll quickly see while reading the MWI, there are really several CSS standards and it’s important to know which one applies to what you’re creating. The same is true for XHTML, which comes in several flavors. And while HTML5 is very new, it is already starting to affect the Web in general and mobile in particular. One book I’ve found that offers a quick overview of these standards and other considerations for mobile development is Beginning Smartphone Web Development by Gail Frederick and Rajesh Lal (Apress 2010).

  • Despite the W3C’s power and credibility, it’s still subject to vendor and political disagreements that can affect or delay its work. This had lead to the emergence of competing standards and groups, at least one of which (that I know of) is worth looking into. This is WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe), a database of mobile device characteristics created as part of an effort to reduce fragmentation of development efforts caused by different technical standards on different devices. One by-product of WURFL is the Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, maintained by a former Openwave developer named Luca Passani and available at www.passani.it/gap/.

Summary

When Windows-based online help first appeared in the late 1980s, there were few coding or authoring standards; that was evidenced by the many nonstandard designs and code-level hacks. Since then, the technical communication community has been adopting new generations of technology like HTML, XML, and DITA; adapting to increasingly rigorous coding standards; and developing increasingly rigorous authoring standards, often on the fly.

The latest generation of technology to affect technical communication is mobile. What the MWI offers technical communication is a defined set of standards, tools, and best practices from a recognized standard body that can be adopted wholesale or cherry-picked as necessary. If you’re starting to look at moving into mobile or adding mobile to your outputs, the MWI is definitely worth reading.

The W3C’s Francois Daoust was quoted in the Frederick and Lal book mentioned above as saying that “A mobile device is a magic wand.” Think of the MWI as the standards that make the Hogwarts School of Magic possible.

Neil Perlin (nperlin@nperlin.cnc.net) has 32 years’ experience in technical communication, with 26 in training, consulting, and development for various types of online formats and tools such as WinHelp, HTML Help, CE Help, JavaHelp, RoboHelp, and many now forgotten. Neil is a columnist and frequent speaker for STC and other professional groups, a member of the STC Boston Chapter, the creator and manager of the Beyond the Bleeding Edge stem at the STC Summit, and an STC Fellow. Neil is a Madcap Certified Instructor for Flare and Mimic and an Adobe Certified Instructor for RoboHelp and Captivate. He provides training, consulting, and development for online help and documentation, Flare, RoboHelp, Captivate, mobile, structured authoring, and single-sourcing through Hyper/Word Services of Tewksbury, MA (www.hyperword.com).

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