As with any media platform, in order for information to be delivered successfully en masse, there needs to be a general consensus about how the information will be presented to users. At the moment, there are an abundance of sources outlining best practices and design techniques for mobile content, but little empirical data to back up these guidelines. That data has not been collected and analyzed in any significant quantities to determine actual best practices (maximizing usability and "stickiness" of web pages delivered to handheld devices) is a problem for the near-term development of an integrated Web.
The W3C has published several documents (including W3C Mobile Web Best Practices , Mobile Web Techniques for Best Practices , and Scope of Mobile Web Best Practices). These documents, while informative, describe only what can be done when creating pages for this platform, not what works best for the users. There does not appear to have been any user testing or focus group interviews to learn what users prefer and how users interact with web pages served to a smaller screen.
Since the WAP standards include subsets of XHTML and CSS, developers can move rather easily into creating content for mobile devices. Where this becomes problematic is, these developers are experienced (mainly) on the personal computer platform, a platform heavily standardized in terms web services and on top of that, these existing standards have been developed as a result of thorough usability testing. With a personal computer, developers always have a worst case scenario: a screen at 800 X 600 resolution. With mobile devices there is a huge range of screen sizes and that range is increasing steadily.
The main topic that is being discussed at the moment is accessibility. While these are important issues, the papers being published are largely theoretical and still don't cite any raw statistical data. The new WAP standard makes accessibility much easier and the focus needs to be turned towards standardization of content.
The best practices guidelines have been compiled from a number of papers and articles (listed here). No usability testing or focus group data has been cited.
This site outlines some current issues being addressed by the W3C including Multimodal Interaction, Device Independence, and Multimodal Messaging.
This document is a set of guidelines for using HTML to provide content to mobile browsers. The guidelines were compiled from a number of documents (listed here).
WAP tutorial and WML reference.
This articles outlines some of the differences between using WML and XHTML-MP and goes on to give some information on configuring Apache to serve up mobile content.
This articles deals with server configuration, CGI-Script handling and using WURFLto determine browser capabilities.
The article focuses mainly on design concepts and what NOT to do when designing sites for mobile devices. Some tips for Opera compatability and image handling are also provided.
Basic guide to the CSS Mobile Profile 1.0
In-depth analysis on Mobile Web Best Practices. The author claims that the W3C standards are not backed up with any practical user data, but he does not provide this data for his assertions either. This document was compiled from a number of sources (listed here).
Mainly design tips based on what works and what does not and how different devices handle certain code.
Design tips only, no concrete standards provided.
Interesting experiment using several different mobile browsers to load several different websites. Screenshots and analysis for each site are provided.
This article was written and these materials were gathered & examined by Gage LaFleur, who is currently an RIT undergraduate. You can also access some of the PDF files he found here.