W3C Workshop this afternoon, MoMo tonight. Presentations, panels & briefings tomorrow and Thursday.
Give me a shout if you are about.
It’s a pre-conference workshop right now, so just figuring out the crowd. Seems a bit telecomsy. The conference poster shows a woman in a speeding car with laptop surfing the web (with husband speaking into phone). WTF.
Occasional Jaiku coverage until my N73 battery dies each day.
London, Orlando, Boston. This week it’s the turn of San Francisco to host the next of what appears to be becoming this Autumn’s fortnightly conference-series-just-with-different-names.
Signs are good that this is going to be the best one though. To some extent, there are a few of the usual suspects there. But slides have been banned (yay) and that should stimulate discussion. And I rate the organisers highly – they’ve brought together a good crowd.
Personally, I hope we spend as little time as possible bolstering our own cliquey reputations, and more time trying to figure out how to make sure that next year, we’re down the road (storming the palace) rather than sitting it out on the periphery.
Still, the mobile revolution has to start somewhere I guess.
(And I don’t mean with dodgy regex!)
Apart from a shed-load of domain activity going on, the dotMobi Technology Team sneaked out not one, but two important pieces of work this week.
1. Jo Rabin (our W3C representative extraordinaire) has created an addendum to our current styleguides. We think developers should know that HTTP headers like cache-control and vary are excellent tools for ensuring that transcoding platforms don’t disrupt content that’s been made for mobile.
We know that a little bit of a holy war has spilled out across the internet between mobile developers and Vodafones UK & Ireland: who have recently introduced transcoding proxies to improve the experience of users accessing not-made-for-mobile-sites.
We thought it was helpful to actually provide some constructive ideas for how developers can deal with the transcoding vogue. And at the same time, we’re hoping our relationship with standards bodies and network operators will help others to understand and mitigate the pain that developers feel.
I’d actually believe that transcoding is really just a safety net for users (who probably don’t actually know that many made-for-mobile URLs off the top of their heads). If, over time, such sites became more ubiquitous, one would hope that the need for blanket transcoding might decline.
2. As if that wasn’t enough, we launched a beta of our mobile web directory this week. We call it find.mobi because we think finding things when mobile is more important than searching for them.
We have a web UI on the front of the directory (which you can go ahead and try at http://find.mobi). We think there are some interesting aspects to the way this works, specifically intended for the mobile context. Ronan has the details.
We’re not trying to compete with existing search providers (including our own investors!). Rather, we are demonstrating how it is possible to showcase and champion made-for-mobile sites – which Find.mobi contains exclusively – and we’re able to syndicate the directory and the indexes to other parties to help them improve their knowledge of made-for-mobile sites. Enjoy.
Oh – and do I need to say we’ve still a global device database in the works? 
We’re deeply chuffed that the mighty WAP Review has reviewed dotMobi’s recent efforts so positively. Thank you Dennis.
And it’s just the start of things to come!
(Can’t stop now… got to get back to building them )
I shouldn’t laugh, because these flip cards are very cool and are the tip of an iceberg of lots of hard work.
But of all the pages to exhibit a CSS interoperability issue, this was cruel luck, and I’m afraid it made me smile :-)
(Looks fine in Firefox of course. I wonder about mobile browsers…)
Otherwise, great work W3C!
