Trip Report WWW2004 W3C and the mobil web

there were approximately 50 attendees.

overview of web mobile standards:

what's different about mobile ?

• small displays, keypads and keys
• one or two hand operation
• limited bandwidth
• battery constraints compute power you can use
• higher expectations about reliability
• wide variety of form factors

W3C work with mobiles:

• mobile profiles for XHTML, SVG, SMIL, CSS
• new ways to interact with mobile devices
• liaisons with related standard organizations

today's challenges:

• take advantage of existing devices
• avoid segmentation of the web (new proposed top level domain .mobi would actually lead to fragmentation of the web)
• allowing everybody to access all resources, independently of their equipment, location, environment, disabilities etc.
• help authors of web content to meet their challenges (provide the same content only once, even for completely different medias and/or devices)

see www.w3.org/2001/di/ for details.

device independent web:

requirements to achive device independence:

• standardized markup languages that would run on a wide range of devices such as:
  • XHTML / XHTML basic / XHTML printer profile
  • SVG / SVG mobile profile
  • SMIL / SMIL basic
  • CSS / CSS TV profile / CSS mobile profile
• authoring: seperate content and presentation using CSS

content selection:

• express alternate content or resources
• express conditions for delivery, e.g.
  

  <sel:select>
    <sel:when sel:expr="screen-width > 400>
      <img ...>
    <sel:when otherwise>
      <p>...</p>
    </sel:select>

pagination and navigation:

• let authors give hints for pagination and generated navigation

content negotiation:

• information before delivery of content, such as:
  • user preferences
  • device characteristics
  • context and environment
• standardized set of properties
• information on the available content

Composite Capability / Preference Profiles (CC/PP):
general framework for user agents to describe the device characteristics, context, user preferences / constraints.
consists of 4 elements:

1. structure
2. vocabulary
3. transport protocol
4. processing rules

structure: CC/PP 1.0 a W3C recommendation based on RDF, now working on the other areas, such as

• presentation characteristics:
  • provide a set of standardized attributes to describe presentation capabilities of the device
  • consolidate earlier inconsistent attempts such as SMIL, CSS etc
  
  
  
• document profile:
  • provide a standardized way to describe content characteristics

question from the floor: will CC/PP adapted to reflect the latest version of RDF ?
answer: with the next review of CC/PP

question from the floor: will CC/PP be modular enough so that it can handle hardware extensions.
answer: CC/PP is flexible enough to handle HW changes.

question from the floor: what is the collaboration between the device independence working group (DI-WG) and the web accessibility initiative working group (WAI-WG) ?
answer: we are working together, join each others meetings etc

see www.w3.org/Mobile/CCPP/ for details.

SVG 1.2 and mobile:

what is SVG ?

• a rendering model
• an API for graphics
• XML markup
• plus an animation engine

about the rendering model:

• model for drawing onto a 2D surface
• surface could be a screen, printer or something else
• device indpendent: make as few assumption about the hardware as possible

about rendering graphics:

• infinite bendable canvas
• model enables rendering of most web and W3C presentation formats
• has an event interface

SVG mobile:

• two profiles: tiny and basic
• SVG Mobile 1.1 became a W3C recommendation in january 2003
• usefull for messages, animations, presentations, but not (yet) for games
• V1.2 tiny will be comming soon and add scripting (for games), opacity, gradients

new features with SVG 1.2:

• working with JCP on a better DOM
• XBL mapping between user specific markup and SVG
• SVG print as a complement to XHTML print and XSL:FO
• new graphics features:
  • flow of graphics and text
  • support for audio and video
  • more SMIL
  • multiple pages/scenes
  • compositing
  • vector effects
• new interaction features:
  • editable text fields
  • multiple links
  • cursors
  • rendering hints
• new APIs:
  • helper functions
  • network interface
  • file upload
  • download progress
  • XML parsing
  • timing
  • client-side storing
  :

see www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ for details.

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