W3C introduces mobile friendliness check

The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) obviously have their site validator (you can see validator buttons on the bottom of some websites) that can check your HTML markup, CSS markup and RSS feeds to see if they match the standards defined in the doctype declaration at the top of your web page. But there hasn’t been a tool that allows you to see if a site you design would actually work well on a small screen like a PDA or mobile phone. But now the W3C have now added a new section to their validator engine called mobileOK.

The founder of the internet and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said a few words about the new tool, “it does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time.”

Before you put your site through the new validator you can have a look at a few pages that have their best practices specification and a group to join. This is also a way to make sure users get the best experience across the mobile web. But to give you a few tips here is a short list:

• XHTML Basic 1.1. for markup format
• Images should be small, either GIF or JPEG, and have alt attributes
• Remove whitespaces and comments by adding a cleaning step in the publication process (e.g. through tidy)
• Keep page size under 20 KB, and the markup under 10 KB to ensure timeliness of retrieval and rendering by mobile devices
• If you use scripts, ensure scripting support is not required
• Don’t use frames, pop-ups or applets
• Formats that require plugins are likely to break on mobile devices.

Have a look at the new validator, at the moment that validator is having a few problems, possibly due to the ammount of traffic. Let me know what you think.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

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