Lately, I have had the chance to play around with a set of interesting mobile devices. Most of those had access to the Internet through a mobile browser with either a WiFi or GRPS or 3G connection.
As a mobile phone user, I spend a serious amount of bandwidth navigating the mobile internet. Some of the things I spend my bandwidth on are news, J2ME applications download, emails, and once in a while, I like to do some research through Mobile Google (http://m.google.com).
Lately however, I had a huge need to find some information on the "regular" Web if I may put it that way. For example, imagine not being on a computer and needing to do some quick research on "Nestle Bottled Water". You will find out that most of the website that will be returned by Google Mobile or Yahoo Mobile or MSN Mobile Search are not real mobile websites or because there are no mobile websites on the subject, the search returns nothing. Now that we live in a world where one can access information whenever one Needs it, it is very irritating to discover that the mobile web has not developed any further than what it was a few years ago.
Further research shows that mobile websites can be developed by using a set of tools that already exist such as CSS specific to mobile devices, mobile protocol specific-tags and a few others. The biggest problems with these tools seem to be related to the double work involved in developing mobile websites. So, in an organization, the Web team would for example be in charge of developing the "regular" website and then spend another tremendous amount of time developing the mobile website. Even when this is done, there seems to be a huge disparity between both contents. This is a problem: as developers, we need to remember that the main reason behind visitors on a website is the content offered. Therefore, there is a need for website owners and other web content providers to be able to offer such content.
Based on the facts above, and with some input from Charl, I have come up with a proposal to make websites more accessible to mobile devices.
As highlighted earlier, most search engines provide ways of searching not only the little amount of mobile content available, but also the "regular" Web. The problem with the content found on the "regular" Web is that either most cellphones cannot load it or that when they load it, everything is loaded, including a fair amount of unecessary content a mobile visitor would not be interested into.
Our proposal is therefore to allow any mobile device to access the "regular" Web by only loading "TEXT/OTHER TYPES OF DEFINED CONTENT" that contains "INFORMATION" that is "RELEVANT" to and is "GENERICALLY SPECIFIC" to mobile users.
This can be done by developing a platform to which Web content providers can subscribe. Through their subscription, the platform will be in charge of pinging their website, crawling its content and caching it locally. To faciliate the production of such contents, specific Microformat tags can be developed with the community and agreed upon. Such tags will target a variety of properties on websites such as designating which contents are relevant to the platform, hierarchical views of that content (bread-crumbs?, menus?), etc... (more will come to light as the platform is being developed).
Also, as more thought is being put into the platform, it should be able to move away from the subcription model and proxy a "regular" website on the go in order to turn it into a "mobile" one. The platform should and hopefully if developed will be able to provide consistent navigation, which is appropriate for viewing/using on mobile device screens.
Developing such a platform is a monster of a challenging work. But if carefully planned/designed and architectured, such platform would be able to define the mobile Web's future.
More ideas on this would be available on the blog and maybe in the future a dedicated blog will be created to let you know about further developments.
-- JPGeek.
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