Testing, Best Practices

Measuring the Effects of Operator Transcoders

ronan — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:59:05 +0000

The issue of mobile-operator transcoders on the mobile web has been hugely controversial. For many iPhone and Android phone owners the negative effects of the transcoders are no longer visible and the issue has dropped off the radar, but they remain a serious problem for those using lower-end devices.

Post Markup Directly to mobiReady.com

ruadhan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:33:37 +0000

If you missed our newsletter yesterday you are probably not aware of a small announcement we made in it. We've pushed out a few updates to mobiReady.com, our mobile-readiness page testing tool. The most significant change is that you can now post markup directly to the service, instead of posting a URL for the service to visit and test.

Getting started with the ready.mobi API

ruadhan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:50:56 +0000

Ready.mobi is a well known page testing tool offered by dotMobi. When you supply a page URL to ready.mobi, it evaluates how well the page is likely to display on mobile devices by testing against the Mobile Web Best Practices, and dotMobi compliance rules.

Ready.mobi API update

ruadhan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:50:38 +0000

We've just gone live with an new version of the ready.mobi API. (Full details and code samples here). So what's new in this version? The most notable feature in this version is the ability to post markup directly to the ready.mobi API without having to supply a publicly accessible URL to the service.

This is the result of some early feedback on the API that during the development cycle pages often did not have a public URL, and so they could not be tested with ready.mobi.

Fixit - Image Resizing

ruadhan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:26:09 +0000

Images such as bitmaps have an intrinsic pixel size. Telling the browser in advance what the size is avoids it having to re-flow the page when it receives it. Resizing images at the server reduces the amount of data transferred and the amount of processing the client has to carry out to scale the image.

Fixit - Measures

ruadhan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:03:47 +0000

Avoiding pixel and absolute measures allows the browser to adapt content to fit the display, though there are exceptions to this rule (see below). This test checks for the use of absolulte and pixel measures where relative measures would be more appropriate

Fixit - Tables

ruadhan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:45:21 +0000

This test determines if your page uses tables. Tables do not work well on limited size screens and may result in the user having to scroll horizontally to read them. Putting navigational links into tables may result in the user having both to scroll horizontally and vertically to see possible navigational choices.

Fixit - Tables for layout

ruadhan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:50:07 +0000

This test attempts to determines if your page is using tables for layout purposes. Tables should be used to present tabular data, rather than to control the layout of a page. The problems associated with using tables for layout are well documented. In particular, they generally require more markup and take longer to render than acheiving the same with CSS.

Fixit - Nested Tables

ruadhan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:19:48 +0000

This test determines if your page make use of nested tables. Mobile devices often cannot display nested tables correctly. When a mobile device is capable of displaying nested tables, the computations required to render the tables can consume lot of CPU and add to the display time for the page.

Fixit - External Resources

ruadhan — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:34:28 +0000

This test determines how many externally linked resources your page relies on. Linked resources include images, stylesheets and other objects. Each externally linked resource requires a separate request across the network. This may add a significant amount to the page load time in the mobile context.