Do you have a Web site which is compliant with the W3C‘s Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines? If so, you may be interested to see if your site is going to require any additional work in order to make it mobile friendly or, as the W3C calls it Mobile OK.

The W3C has just published a first public working draft of a Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document. This document aims to bridge the gap between WCAG and the Mobile Web Best Practices by providing direct mappings between the guidelines. If you know what WCAG checkpoints your site conforms to, then this document will tell you what additional steps you need to take to also make it Mobile OK.

It’s a very useful document as it demonstrates just how little effort is actually required to make your website Mobile OK.

Yesterday afternoon the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first public working draft of the HTML 5.0 specification. The official press release can be found here. Its taken 11 months since work began on HTML 5.0 for this first public working draft to get released. A pretty impressive effort in my opinion, having first hand experience at just how slow some W3C groups are run.

The main goal of HTML 5.0 is to make it easier for developers to create dynamic content and it introduces a load of new elements to enable this.

A final release of HTML 5.0 is still a long way off but this working draft provides an insight into where HTML is heading and the future is looking bright.

I’ve been doing some work on http://contentlabel.org/ and the labeling vocabularies are coming along nicely. We now have vocabs for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Section 580, Pan European Game Information, Creative Common Licenses and Mobile OK Basic Tests.

Next on the agenda is a vocabulary for the mobile web best practices and blogs.

If there is a code of conduct YOU would like seen turned into a content label vocabulary then drop me a message on http://contentlabel.org/ and we’ll try and cook one up

I was out with Paul last night following Day 1 of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices face to face meeting and he confessed to me that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for him to let the world know his every thought. Lets face it, he does have the occasional good idea or opinion. My heart went out to him and i thought to myself ‘this tragedy can not be allowed to go on any longer’. What to do, what to do….

….I know! He needs a blog gimp!

Behold, the must have accessory for the modern Web 2.0 blogger. Afterall, it is an awful chore to blog whilst drunk or hungover.

Blog Gimp code of conduct:

1. blog gimps MUST blog its masters every thought and opinion
2. blog gimps MUST NOT exercise editorial license
3. blog gimps MUST NEVER EVER speak (the threat that blog gimp will reveal itself to be more intelligent/interesting than its master is all too real)
4. blog gimps MUST go where its master goes. Toilet breaks are the only exception, however, deviant masters may ignore this exception if they so wish
5. blog gimps MUST wear standard gimp attire (see image for reference)

All applicants should email paul directly and include a photo.

OK, let me start by saying i fully support the goals of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and believe that much of our work to date has been excellent. However i think that we made a wrong decision yesterday at Day 1 of our face to face meeting. Allow me to give a little background before explaining what the decision was and why i think it was a mistake…

So the way it all works is that the best practices have been divided into 2 levels. MobileOK Basic, which are those that can be tested / verified programmatically and MobileOK Pro (this name has not been formalised yet), which are those which require manual (human) tests. The idea is for these to be used in the same way as the WCAG A, AA and AAA levels. Sites which pass all the tests in MobileOK Basic Best Practices will be able to display the MobileOK Basic icon. In addition to the icon the site will also be able to implement a POWDER label which will allow machines to recognise that the site is MobileOK Basic compliant. This has the potential to allow users to see that a site is MobileOK Basic compliant before they even visit it which enables them to make an informed decision as to weather or not they want to visit the site.

Fantastic, we’re unleashing some pretty cool technology which will make for a much better mobile web browsing experience

Now to get to the decision that was made yesterday… The group decided that the MobileOK POWDER vocabulary will only support the 2 levels of claims. Does not sound all that bad does it? Allow me to explain why i think it was the wrong decision…

The beauty of POWDER is that it allows you make claims about anything. I.e. it has the potential to allow claims to be made against each individual best practice. The MWBP group made a conscious decision yesterday to not support these individual claims. If you want to make a claim using the MobileOK POWDER vocabulary the only ones you will be able to make are ‘This site conforms to MobileOK Basic’ and ‘This site conforms to MobileOK PRO’. This in my opinion was wrong for the following reasons…

1. Companies / developers may have technical limitations which prevent them from conforming to some of the best practices. They have, however invested a lot of time and effort in making there site as accesble as possible on mobile devices. Shouldn’t they be allowed to proudly make statements regarding which BP’s they adhere to?
2. The nature of POWDER means that anyone else can make a MobileOK vocabulary and use it to make individual claims. I can guarantee that Segala will be making a MobileOK vocabulary which allows individual BP claims to be made. We’d much rather see it aa W3C endorsed vocabulary though.
3. Companies / developers might prefer to develop there Mobile web site in a phased approach. They should be able to make statements about which claims they have fulfilled to date.

It’s my belief that by allowing people to make individual claims you encourage implementation.

NOTE: conversely to all this, i do believe that only people who implement all the required best practices should be allowed to display the MOK icon.

DISCLAIMER: i did not attend the face to face meeting in person but tracked it (and made comments) via IRC and had discussions with several of the participants after the event (over a drink or two)

Segala has been waving the RDF/Semantic Web banner for a few years now and it seems we ARE as ‘crazy’ as everyone said…

 12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise

Hey, they once laughed when Columbus said the world was round. Maybe we’ll get the last laugh after all

Mention the Semantic Web to most people and their eyes will glaze over. I’m sure that on more than one occassion it has been responsible for triggering out of body experiences It’s not that bad people! Actually, the Semantic Web is pretty cool and has the potential to change the way we use the internet.

Simply put, the Semantic Web is all about machine discoverable data. Its kind of like META data but more flexible and a whole lot more powerful.

Take the simple example of your typical ‘contact us’ page on just about any website on the internet. Normally you could expect to find email and postal addresses and phone and fax numbers. That’s great for you and me (i.e. humans) but what’s a machine to do? How does it now that number X is a phone number and number Y is a fax? Well, the Semantic web makes this possible by allowing this data to be marked up in such a way that machines will now be able to recognise it. But why would you want to do this? To make your life easier of course!!

Imagine you had a SW (Semantic Web) extension installed in your browser which could detect marked up data and automatically add a contact to your contact list of your favourite email, messenger and voip applications. How cool would that be!? Thats the potential power of the Semantic Web!

The W3C recently formed the Semantic Web Education & Outreach Working Group who’s goal is pretty self evident. They recently put together a wiki so that developers or anyone with a good idea can suggest a project that can be used as a demonstration of the Semantic Web.

If you have a good idea then i encourage you to contribute to the wiki. The deadline for submissions is the 13th of February so get your thinking cap on.