mobile SEO » Standards

W3C Release Candidate Recommendation

Paul Bennett — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:02:32 +0000

Since the 2004 co-operation agreement - entered into by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) - both browser and content developers have been waiting for this progress milestone.

Last Friday, 13th July 2007, marked the release of the Candidate Recommendation for XHTML Basic 1.1.

The Candidate Recommendation (CR) is a process stage, following the Working Draft, in which the proposed standard is now reviewed by its immediate technical community.

Catching up on a little background

The humble beginnings of W3C’s XHTML Basic specification date back to late 2000 and included a minimal set of modules for resource-constrained wireless devices and was designed as a common base that could be extended.

In 2001 the OMA did just that - announcing XHTML Mobile Profile (MP) - an extended version with modules, elements and attributes “to provide a richer authoring language“.

A useful timeline can be found here:

So, what exactly does this mean?

For some time now both variants have been targeting the mobile space, but neither are an exact superset of the other. Naturally this made it unclear for developers who need to embrace the right technology in order to accelerate the Mobile Web.

Although the collaboration has taken three years to reach this point, it is a significant step forward. The CR is a strong indication that XHTML Basic 1.1 will finally become the reference in terms of markup language for mobile.

Mobile Web defined in terms of Markup Language

Paul Bennett — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:52:02 +0000

The ‘Mobile Web’ consists [ mostly ] of three types of Markup Language that we need to know about:

WML (often called WAP 1.0) - based on XML - a content formatting standard.

xHTML Mobile Profile (often called WAP 2.0) - derived from xHTML 1.1 Basic but with additional modules.

cHTML or Compact HTML (often called iMode) - uses a subset of the standard HTML 2.0, 3.2 or 4.0 specifications.

A page coded in one of the above Markup Standards would normally identify itself in the DTD. Mobile user agents (browser and crawler) will look for this ‘mobile’ page declaration. Example:

"http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile11.dtd">

Google Mobile Web crawls only content declared as mobile compliant - hence a different index and a different set of search results.

Google Web (on a mobile) uses the regular datacentre indexes - where results match the desktop.

Hoschka Calls For Concerted Effort

Paul Bennett — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:41:16 +0000

Over at the MWI Team Blog, Philipp Hoschka, co-founder and leader of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, puts forward a coherent outline of the Mobile Web’s full potential.

Hoschka presents evidence from a number of perspectives, including emerging markets and world-wide access to mobile-browsing — an astonishing 25% of the world’s population. Whilst a lot of earlier technical problems holding back the Mobile Web have been overcome, his principle message is that it’s the content providers that now face the biggest challenges.

Lack of Usability (content not transfering from desktop to handset) and Lack of Interoperability (content not rendered consistently from handset to handset) are pin-pointed as the two main factors holding back massive growth.

Philipp calls the community to make a

“concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain”

both to adopt standards and to encourage mobile web usage by displaying the proposed mobileOK mark.