Justin Richards reports back from Edinburgh, which played host to this year's World Wide Web conference.

The demand for a mobile web is there but can the technology of today provide the functional support necessary for this 'holy grail' of web applications?

'Ultimately the web will become an omnipresent service platform available on any device at any time,' said Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone. 'And in future all user experiences of this "service platform" will differ according to the individual users' requirements.'

Appelquist's vision, which he outlined at the recent WWW2006 conference, is a far cry from the current problematic reality of trying to access web pages from mobile devices.

'As a general rule the web does not work very well on mobile devices at the moment, even though almost two thirds of mobile devices are web capable,' said Dominique Hazaël-Massieux of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. He was also speaking at WWW2006 of which BCS was a major sponsor.

Charles McCathie Neville of Opera believes that the biggest problem that mobile devices currently face is that there are too many different platforms to accommodate and to write for.

'On the plus side such devices are becoming cheaper and the mobile web service is moving away from the "walled garden" approach taken by some service providers, who have limited what their customers can access,' said Dominique.

The essential need is for one web which works consistently on all devices (thematic consistency), which exploits device capabilities and can be easily tested on actual devices, according to Appelquist.

With this in mind, at least in the short-term, designers should aim to use short URLs and navigation bars, balanced navigation, access keys, and avoid the use of image maps, pop-ups, auto refresh, and redirection.

According to the findings of the W3C best practice group, in order to produce a mobile-friendly website designers should also avoid using externally linked resources, ensure the suitability of the content within a mobile context, use clear language, limit content to user request, limit scrolling to one direction, and use non-text alternatives where possible.

Designers should also pay more attention to colour and contrast, consider background image readability, and avoid pixels and absolute measures.

Longer term, other solutions for web-enabled devices are in the pipeline. It should be possible in future to load Java code directly into mobiles to access the web, according to James Pearce of the W3C Device Descriptions Working Group.

'Mobile Web 2.0 will be all content based, whereby all content, both archive and current, will be easily accessible to all from mobile devices, and instant messaging will be built into the mobile webpage.'

James also highlighted the need for conditions to exist that will enable the development of globally accessible and sustainable data and services, which provide device description information applicable to content adaptation.

With this in mind the working group is currently gathering information on developing a suitable information repository for mobile usage.

'The future of the mobile web will be one of rich user experiences, where once a person has accessed an application they will not have to use a browser,' said Roland Geisler from Nokia. 'A common OSS browser is core to the future of the mobile industry.'

With this in mind Nokia is releasing its own platform to the open source community to help service providers develop sites for mobile users.

'In future it is likely we will see mobile-only web users,' said Dominique, 'but only if future development work is centred around the user and not the technology, as it is now.'

September 2006