Mobile Web Best Practices
Developing a mobile web site could be not a hard task if you know what device you talk with and its screen size and use the best XHTML code it will be very easy to do it, the real problem comes when you want to ensure that its work well across different devices, adaptation sure help in this task but if you follow some check list it will give us best results.
Best Practices in delivering web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices, there is much computation in the web to provide us with the best practice for creating a good mobile web site, and here is a list for some of them:
- W3C mobile best practices (http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp)
- Luca Passani Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web (http://www.passani.it/gap)
- Making Small Devices Look Great (http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/making-small-devices-look-great)
- Best Practices in XHTML Design (http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/support/documentation/guides_and_references/best_practices_in_xhtml_design/index.htm)
- As W3C is the responsible organization to develop common standards for the World Wide Web so we will list some of mobile Web best practices that W3C tell us about.
- Ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields a thematically coherent experience when accessed from different devices.
- Exploit device capabilities to provide an enhanced user experience.
- Take reasonable steps to work around deficient implementations.
- Carry out testing on actual devices as well as emulators.
- Keep the URIs of site entry points short.
- Provide only minimal navigation at the top of the page.
- Take into account the trade-off between having too many links on a page and asking the user to follow too many links to reach what they are looking for.
- Provide consistent navigation mechanisms.
- Assign access keys to links in navigational menus and frequently accessed functionality.
- Clearly identify the target of each link.
- Note the target file’s format unless you know the device supports it.
- Do not use image maps unless you know the device supports them effectively.
- Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.
- Do not create periodically auto-refreshing pages, unless you have informed the user and provided a means of stopping it.
- Do not use markup to redirect pages automatically. Instead, configure the server to perform redirects by means of HTTP 3xx codes.
- Keep the number of externally linked resources to a minimum.
- Ensure that content is suitable for use in a mobile context.
- Use clear and simple language.
- Limit content to what the user has requested.
- Divide pages into usable but limited size portions.
- Ensure that the overall size of page is appropriate to the memory limitations of the device.
- Limit scrolling to one direction, unless secondary scrolling cannot be avoided.
- Ensure that material that is central to the meaning of the page precedes material that is not.
- Do not use graphics for spacing.
- Do not use images that cannot be rendered by the device. Avoid large or high resolution images except where critical information would otherwise be lost.
- Ensure that information conveyed with color is also available without color.
- Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast.
- When using background images make sure that content remains readable on the device.
- Provide a short but descriptive page title.
- Do not use frames.
- Use features of the markup language to indicate logical document structure.
- Do not use tables unless the device is known to support them.
- Do not use nested tables.
- Do not use tables for layout.
- Where possible, use an alternative to tabular presentation.
- Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
- Do not rely on embedded objects or script.
- Specify the size of images in markup, if they have an intrinsic size.
- Resize images at the server, if they have an intrinsic size.
- Create documents that validate to published formal grammars.
- Do not use pixel measures and do not use absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values.
- Use style sheets to control layout and presentation, unless the device is known not to support them.
- Organize documents so that if necessary they may be read without style sheets.
- Keep style sheets small.
- Use terse, efficient markup.
- Send content in a format that is known to be supported by the device.
- Where possible, send content in a preferred format.
- Ensure that content is encoded using a character encoding that is known to be supported by the target device.
- Indicate in the response the character encoding being used.
- Provide informative error messages and a means of navigating away from an error message back to useful information.
- Do not rely on cookies being available.
- Provide caching information in HTTP responses.
- Do not rely on support of font related styling.
- Keep the number of keystrokes to a minimum.
- Avoid free text entry where possible.
- Provide pre-selected default values where possible.
- Specify a default text entry mode, language and/or input format, if the target device is known to support it.
- Create a logical order through links, form controls and objects.
- Label all form controls appropriately and explicitly associate labels with form controls.
- Position labels so they lay out properly in relation to the form controls they refer to.
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Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is the latest paradigm that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Everyone linked with the cloud industry has his own definition. Users of cloud computing can access applications and documents from anywhere in the world the same way as with desktop computers and making it easier for group members in different locations to collaborate. In cloud computing, everything is hosted in the cloud network which is a collection of computers and servers accessed via the Internet. The history of cloud computing is coming from the electricity revolution, a century ago. Before the advent of electrical utilities, every farm and business produced its own electricity from freestanding generators. After the electrical grid was created, farms and businesses shut down their generators and bought electricity from the utilities at a much lower price and with much greater reliability than producing it. Universal access and 24/7 reliability are guaranteed while ubiquitous collaboration is.
Now cloud industry is currently in the early days of the cloud computing revolution. As Sun Microsystems’s slogan is “The network is the computer”, and that’s as good as any to describe how cloud computing works. In essence, a network of computers functions as a single computer to serve data and applications to users over the Internet. The network exists in the cloud of IP addresses that is known as the Internet, offers massive computing power and storage capability, and enables wide scale group collaboration. The definition of the cloud is it is a large group of interconnected computers. These computers can be personal computers or network servers and can be public or private.
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Mobile Limitation and Mobile Web Sites Challenges
The widespread deployment of Web enabled mobile devices made them a target of choice for content creators. Understanding their strengths and their limitations, and using technologies that fit these conditions are keys to create success mobile friendly Web content . The reasons for that include the challenges posed by network costs & delays, memory & Central Processing Unit (CPU) limitations, and keyboard & pointing devices differences. As importantly, mobile devices feature a growing set of advantages with their personal, always available nature, and the increasingly context-aware capabilities.
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is now the most mature technology of using wireless for Internet access. Energy limitations of mobile devices are still an issue and to deal with this limitation, the wireless standard 802.11 includes a Power Saving Mode (PSM), but not much attention has been devoted by the research community to understand the performance in depth. PSM is able to save up to 90% of the energy spent when no energy management is used, however PSM is not the optimal solution for energy management. The objective of the 802.11 PSM is to let the wireless interface of a mobile host in the active mode only for the time necessary to exchange data, and turn it off in sleep mode whenever it becomes idle. In a Wi-Fi hotspot, this is achieved by exploiting the central role of the access point. Each mobile host within the hotspot lets the access point know whether it utilizes the PSM or not. Since the access point relays every frame from/to any mobile host, it buffers frames addressed to mobile hosts using the PSM every beacon interval, usually 100 ms, the access point broadcasts a special frame named beacon.
The mobile Web is still evolving and this is an exciting time of early development, but there are still some hurdles that need to be overcome. As seen familiar brands such as Facebook and MySpace porting their presences to the mobile domain, users will see a wider adoption of this channel by the mainstream. When creating content for mobile devices, the designers are usually confronted with numerous development standards and technologies to choose from. In addition, hundreds of different mobile devices with varying functional capabilities, screen resolutions, and sizes are under consideration as well as more than 40 distinct mobile browsers. This lack of uniformity renders testing mobile websites and applications for universal compatibility a near impossibility. Mobile Web developers also brave the high expectations of mobile Web users who anticipate the same caliber experience on their handsets that they enjoy on the desktop Web.
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The Web on the Move, Designing a Website for Mobile Users
The history of the web and web browser dates back to late 1980s, when a variety of technologies laid the foundation for the first web browser, World Wide Web was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That was the starting of a new era the web and web browser brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies, at the first days browsing the web was text-based user interfaces when the graphic user interface (GUI) become more popular web browsers also move to GUI but all development of them was tend to the desktop users.
When technology grow fast and mobile devices became an important part from our daily life activities, and the need for access web from a mobile increases more and more, here we discover the problem that is the web was not developed for such devices, but there was many trials and contributions to enhance the access from such device, in this thesis we try to add a new contribution through providing some new techniques that try to solve such problem.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and mobile industry leaders are working together to developing best practices for creating mobile-friendly content and applications, enabling easy access to device descriptions, setting up test suites for increased interoperability of mobile browsers, and exploring ways to use the Web on mobile devices they try also to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater web, The goal is that making Web site access from a mobile device as simple as Web site access from a desktop device, and this is what we called it the web on the move.
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What is the Mobile Web Mean?
Mobile Web refers to browser based web services such as the World Wide Web (www) by using WAP for mobile device such as a cell phone, PDA, or other portable connected device to a public network. Such access does not require a desktop computer or a fixed landline connection. The total number of mobile web users grew past the total number of PC based internet users for the first time in 2009 any web site accessed from a mobile device is mobile web, In 25 November, 2008 European communications write an article with title Mobile internet growth eight times greater than PC-based internet growth, says new analysis, this also tell us that the number of mobile web users become bigger than pc based users.
Mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. This is partly due to the incompatibility of the format of much of the information available on the Internet with mobile devices and partly due to the small physical size of the screens of mobile devices and other device limitations.
Mobile web access was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks, this was the first access to the real internet. The first commercial launch of a mobile-specific browser based mobile web service was in 1999 in Japan when i-Mode was launched by NTT DoCoMo.
Now day mobile Web primarily utilizes lightweight pages written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limitations by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) commonly found on the desktop Web.
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