Jo Rabin
Latest Articles by Jo Rabin
News from W3C: Best Practices, mobileOK and Content Transformation Guidelines Progress
August 7, 2008, by Jo Rabin
Last week, W3C announced the final step of approval of the Mobile Web Best Practices as a W3C Recommendation. It's taken quite a while for it to progress to this point, mainly because it had a dependency on HTML Basic 1.1 the version of XHTML that unifies OMA XHTML-MP and W3C work... Read More
Content Transformation and “The Manifesto”
March 26, 2008, by Jo Rabin
There has been a lot of discussion in recent days on Luca's Manifesto. I just wanted to note that the W3C Content Transformation Task Force is working with industry players to find a resolution to this difficult problem. The goal is to reconcile the objectives of those various players particularly "to help provide users with an acceptable experience of the Web on Mobile". I represent dotMobi on the Task Force and in fact am the editor of the Guidelines that the Task Force is producing... Read More
Over the Air: 48 Hours of Mobile Development, 4-5 April London
March 15, 2008, by Jo Rabin
Registration has just opened for an extraordinary event happening in London over the 4th and 5th of April. Over the Air is a free mobile developer conference covering a wide range of technologies and topics combined with a hands-on code-camp style un-conference. There will be talks and master-class type sessions on a range of technologies and platforms, including Java, Flash, Microsoft, Mobile Web, Android, Series-60, Widgets and Network APIs. There will be a strong user experience theme with sessions on prototyping, mobile design and human factors... Read More
Low Fat or Full Fat, it’s still One Web
December 1, 2007, by Jo Rabin
Well, doesn’t time fly? Just over a year ago I posted on One Web and what I think it means. A year or so later, what has changed? Well, firstly I think that there are a lot more made-for-mobile Web sites. Secondly, the term “One Web” continues to be used to describe the consumption of desktop oriented sites on mobile devices. For example, a post from Alan Patrick last weekend: there are currently 2 main schools of thought - (i) define a unique "mobile web", and (ii) make devices better at coping with existing web content. The problem with the mobile web option is the expenditure given the low pull through …... Read More
FOM – YAMC?
November 29, 2007, by Jo Rabin
Having given it due reflection, I thought I’d record some thoughts about the “Future of Mobile” conference which took place on 14 November at the iMax Cinema in London. There are seemingly hundreds of mobile conferences at the moment, so was this “Yet Another Mobile Conference”, or was it “Yes! Amazing Memorable Content!”... Read More
BT FON, Poetry while mobile, if not in motion …
October 24, 2007, by Jo Rabin
There was a sudden splurge of old Vodafone Betavine blog posts through Planet Mobile Web at the end of last week, amongst which I spotted a post from Kevin Smith about BT FON. That reminded me of their recent announcment and reminded me too that I had been quite surprised about it at the time... Read More
W3C mobileOK Checker Alpha Release
October 17, 2007, by Jo Rabin
This morning Sean Owen from Google announced an alpha release of the W3C mobileOK Basic Tests reference checker. Ruadhan and I have contributed to this open source effort to provide a baseline testing infrastructure. A lot of work has gone into producing it and while it’s not complete, or bug free, it’s great to see this work taking its next step... Read More
Content Transformation Addendum to Web Browsing Style Guide
September 28, 2007, by Jo Rabin
If you have taken the time and trouble to create a "made for mobile" experience, the last thing you would want is that this gets altered by a third party. We've published a consultative document that suggests ways for you to stop that happening... Read More
Mobile Web 2.0 Conference, London, 18-19 September
September 28, 2007, by Jo Rabin
A glorious blue sky over Lord's Cricket Ground was the setting for the opening of the Informa Mobile Web 2.0 conference in London, Tuesday and Wednesday last week. Notably also the week of the Apple iPhone UK launch announcement and the day of Sam Sethi's birthday (not sure which is more notable) this was a gathering of a number of well known figures in the mobile space to talk about what seems to be the topic of the season - you could spend the rest of the Autumn attending these events, which perversely have sprung up like Spring flowers... Read More
Comparison of CSS 2.1, CSS MP, WCSS and CSS Level 1
January 18, 2007, by Jo Rabin
This tables summarizes the differences between the different flavours of CSS that are in use and is a useful reference for developers who are making the transition from from PC web design to mobile web design. Version 0.9 (Draft), 29 Jan 2007 Jo Rabin Some references are works in progress and are subject to change... Read More
