one web and other defintions

Tags: Business,  Design,  Mobile applications,  Mobile web
January 24, 2008 by Barbara

There are three terms flying about the industry that are differently understood by different parties: “one web”, “mobile web”, and “widgets.” The different understandings of these definitions affect everything from coding to strategy.

Mobile Web. Definitions range from “some type of access of data off of a web server from the mobile device” to “web sites accessible from mobile browsers” to “mobilized web sites”. The first definition includes email clients, instant messaging, maps, directions, and so forth. The second definition isn’t helpful, and the third definition is pretty silly. I don’t have a good answer here, and avoid the term entirely. I’ll use “mobile web sites”, “widgets”, “downloaded applications”, and so forth. I define “Mobile Internet” with the first definition.

One Web. The W3C definition is nice, but not terribly useful. It simultaneously says to make the same information available and not to make the same information available. More and more companies are taking the desktop web, shrinking it, and displaying it on a mobile device: “one web”. Opera, at least the various Opera people I’ve spoken with, tend towards writing one web site and maybe using different CSS files for different devices: “one web”.

It’s these latter definitions of “one web” that make more sense to me. Many long tail sites will use one or the other of these options to deliver desktop sites to their mobiles. Other long tail sites will just go with a mobile-friendly site for all their users. But these options come at a cost. The user experience is not as good.

You can get a good feel of what the user experience cost is in yesterday’s Mobile Web USA presentation, now available online.

Why might different CSS files not work? First, the differences in layout can be profound, resulting in very large CSS files and lots of computation (if it can be done at all). Second, the too-large XHTML file still has to be downloaded to the mobile, slowing the user down. Finally, I frequently want to put some of the content on a different page entirely, and CSS can’t do that. Do correct me if I’m wrong, but the comeback will be that CSS1 can’t do that.

Mobile Widgets. I think the most prevalent definition is “small applications created using web technologies and delivered on the mobile device.” This is a good definition, but there are numerous categories within this definition. In our widgets white paper, we focus on widgets available at or near the standby screen. This does include Celltop by Alltel, but does not include Opera Mobile 9 widgets, Nokia Widsets, or Yahoo Go widgets.


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2 Comments »

  1. > The W3C definition is nice, but not terribly useful. It simultaneously says to make the same information available and not to make the same information available.

    Oh dear. Sorry you feel that it’s not very useful. I think that the main point is that providing information in different _representations_ does not break the idea of One Web.

    A test of One Web is whether links provide a functional user experience of “Thematically Consistent” content across different devices - a theme I mentioned back in December - “Low Fat or Full Fat, it’s still One Web” [1]. I suppose that given that the term “One Web” is used by different people to mean opposing things, perhaps there is the need for another term that captures this notion more clearly.

    Jo
    [1] http://dev.mobi/node/705

    Comment by Jo Rabin — January 25, 2008 @ 5:20 am

  2. I’m not developer but I think this post very usefull.

    Comment by Ricardo Rayol — January 25, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

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