mobile SEO

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.