Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group Charter

The mission of the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group (BPWG), part of the Mobile Web Initiative Activity, is to develop a set of technical best practices and associated materials in support of development of web sites that provide an appropriate user experience on mobile devices.

Join the Best Practices Working Group.

End date	31 December 2010
Confidentiality	Proceedings are publicly accessible
Initial Chair	Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone Jo Rabin, mTLD
Initial Team Contact (FTE %: 40)	François Daoust, W3C/ERCIM Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C/ERCIM
Usual Meeting Schedule	Teleconferences: Weekly Face-to-face: 3-4 per year

Scope

The main objective of the Best Practices Working Group (BPWG) is to enable the reach of the Web to be easily extended onto mobile devices by providing guidelines, checklists and best practice statements which are easy to comprehend and implement. These, when implemented by a Web site provider will enable the content to be perceived by users on mobile devices, particularly small-screen devices such as PDAs, browser-enabled phones and touch-screen devices.

Following the best practice guidelines will benefit Web site providers by enabling more users to access their content and services from more types of devices.

The intent of the Best Practices Working Group is not to force content providers to limit the scope of their content delivery only those mechanisms which are available on mobile devices. Rather, the guidelines produced by the Best Practices Working Group are intended to enable content to be seamlessly perceived across a range of device form factors. Although mobile browsing user experience is a function of multiple variables — including a variety of device-, browser-, network- and content-related factors — the BPWG will be considering only those directly relevant to its primary focus on content authoring and adaptation guidelines.

The scope of the Best Practices Working Group consists of the following specific items:

Creation of materials to guide authors in creating web sites that conform to the requirements of a trustmark (working name: "mobileOK") based on existing standards and taking account of existing best practices.
Dimensions of analysis associated with best practice include, but are not limited to
- Valid markup
- content-adaptation guidelines
- User experience issues
Definition of the meaning of conformance to best practices
Development of mechanisms by which the level of conformance to best practices can be assessed.
Creation of appropriate materials, for site builders and tools vendors, which may include:
- Authoring guides
- Informative tutorial-type material
- Requirements for a validation tool or tools
Creation and establishment of the mobileOK trustmark. Issues to be discussed include the provision of machine readable and human readable forms of the mark, discoverability of sites that conform, outreach to the organizations that are consumers of the trustmark.

Success Criteria

Production of stable documents addressing the work items.
User community and industry adoption of the group deliverables.

Out of Scope

There is no intent for the Best Practices Working Group to develop new technology, such as markup languages. However if, during its work, the need for new technologies is identified, the group may raise requirements with other W3C groups or groups within other standards organizations.

Deliverables

This section outlines the deliverables the group will produce.

W3C Recommendation-track Deliverables

W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0: Basic Guidelines: A W3C Recommendation; currently at Proposed Recommendation status
W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0: A W3C Recommendation; working draft in last call
mobileOK Basic checker: Reference Implementation and Test Suite
Mobile Web Application Best Practices: A W3C recommendation whose principal objective is to enable development and delivery of great Web applications on mobile devices. It will expand and amplify upon general statements made in the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 recommendation, especially statements that relate to exploitation of device capabilities and awareness of the delivery context. The recommendation may include some best practices that result from the evolution of networks and devices from the time when the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 recommendation was published.
W3C mobileOK Pro Tests 1.0: A W3C Recommendation that will offer a level of the mobileOK trustmark that implies a higher degree of conformance to the Best Practices. The name of this second level will be determined by the working group.
Labels for mobileOK: A W3C Recommendation describing how to label content as meeting some level of mobileOK and to find content so labeled, including vocabulary specifications as necessary.
Content Transformation Guidelines: A W3C Recommendation providing guidance to content transformation proxies and content providers as to how inter-work when delivering Web content.

Supporting Materials

Deliverables may (subject to resources, progress on the core deliverable and the groups assessment of what is needed) also include

W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0, a non-normative W3C Note that ties the pieces of mobileOK together and will also have definitive information on how and when the trustmark can be used
Updated versions, if necessary, of existing documents
guidelines and trustmarks for authoring-tool production
a W3C Group Note on Relationship Between Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed jointly with WAI on how to meet the combined challenges of accessibility and the mobile Web.

Milestones

Milestones
Specification	FPWD	LC	CR	PR	Rec
Note: See changes from this initial schedule on the group home page.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0					Q3 2008
mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0				Q3 2008	Q3 2008
mobileOK Scheme		Q3 2008	Q4 2008		Q1 2009
mobileOK Basic checker: Reference Implementation and Test Suite	Q3 2008
mobileOK Labels		Q4 2008		Q1 2009	Q2 2009
Mobile Web Application Best Practices	Q3 2008	Q4 2008			Q2 2009
mobileOK Pro Tests 1.0	Q3 2008			Q2 2009	Q2 2009
Content Transformation Guidelines	Q2 2008	Q3 2008	Q4 2008	Q2 2009	Q2 2009
Future of Best Practices	Q1 2009			Q2 2009

The Supporting Materials have not been included in the preceding set of milestones. If the BPWG (during its charter) determines that some of those are important, the milestones listed on the group page will be adjusted to add them.

Timeline View Summary

Q2 2008: WD - Content Transformation Guidelines

Q3 2008: F2F- First face to face meeting under new Charter
Q3 2008: WD - Mobile Web Application Best Practices
Q3 2008: WD - mobileOK Pro Tests 1.0
Q3 2008: LC - mobileOK Scheme
Q3 2008: LC - Content Transformation Guidelines
Q3 2008: PR - mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
Q3 2008: REC- Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
Q3 2008: REC- mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
Q3 2008: ** - mobileOK Checker 1.0 release

Q4 2008: LC - mobileOK Labels
Q4 2008: LC - Mobile Web Application Best Practices
Q4 2008: CR - Content Transformation Guidelines
Q4 2008: CR - mobileOK Scheme

Q1 2009: PR - mobileOK Labels
Q1 2009: REC- mobileOK Scheme
Q1 2009: ** - First draft, Future of Best Practices work proposal

Q2 2009: PR - mobileOK Pro Tests 1.0
Q2 2009: PR - Content Transformation Guidelines
Q2 2009: REC- Mobile Web Application Best Practices
Q2 2009: REC- mobileOK Labels
Q2 2009: REC- mobileOK Pro Tests 1.0
Q2 2009: REC- Content Transformation Guidelines
Q2 2009: ** - Final proposal, Future of Best Practices work

Dependencies

Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group: The Best Practices Working Group will have requirements for tests and will need test results in order to produce some of its deliverables.
POWDER Working Group: Following on from the work of the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG), the POWDER working group will produce technology for identifying resources or groups of resources that are conformant to specified criteria. This group plans to make use of the output of the POWDER working group as the underlying technology for the MobileOK trustmark. We will therefore be closely monitoring this work and inputting into the discussions. We will make every effort to co-locate meetings with the POWDER working group during this charter period in order to facilitate this close liaison.
Web Accessibility Initiative: The Best Practices Working Group expects to work directly with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group to develop guidelines for content accessibility on mobile devices. Furthermore, the Best Practices may review the output of the WCAG Working Group
Hypertext Coordination Group: The Best Practices Working Group will participate in the Hypertext Coordination Group.

Mobile Web Initiative Steering Committee: The Best Practices Working Group exists within the framework of the Mobile Web Initiative. The Best Practices Working Group chair will sit on the MWI Steering Committee.
Open Mobile Alliance: Browsing Technologies Working Group: The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Browsing Technologies (BT) working group drives a number of projects to enhance the applicability and usability of a browsing applications environment that is tuned to the mobile device. The group is tasked with taking existing and emerging web technologies (many from the W3C), and adapting them to the mobile environment.
The outputs of this sub-group are important and influential within the mobile community. It is therefore the intention of the Working Group to develop a strong working relationship with OMA BT by making use of the W3C-OMA liaison agreement which defines basic inter-working principles between the two bodies. This may include email communications between the two groups, joint conference calls and joint or co-located face-to-face meetings.
Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D): The Interest Group will explore how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,...) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.
Device Descriptions Working Group (DDWG): As the DDWG continues its work on defining an architecture for a distributed device information repository, we will continue to liaise with them to ensure that this repository will meet the needs of content authors wishing to implement the Mobile Web Best Practices. We will make every effort to co-locate meetings with the Device Descriptions working group during this charter period in order to facilitate this close liaison.
Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group: The Best Practices Working Group expects to review and monitor the work of the Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group. The Best Practices Working Group may identify requirements that are in the scope of the Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group.
Rich Web Clients Activity: This group will reach out to the W3C Rich Web Clients activity (specifically the Web APIs and Web Application Formats working groups), specifically to determine what role AJAX best practices might best play in the work of the Best Practices Working Group.
Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Working Group: This group will remain connected to the ongoing efforts in the Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) working group and will review drafts as required.

The work of the following Interaction Domain Working Groups may also be relevant to the Best Practices Working Group:

Compound Document Formats
Multimodal Interaction
Synchronized Multimedia

Furthermore, the Best Practices Working Group expects to follow these W3C Recommendations:

Participation

Effective participation in the Best Practices Working Group is expected to consume one work day per week for each participant.

Participants are reminded of the Good Standing requirements of the W3C Process.

Communication

This group uses the public mailing list public-bpwg@w3.org (archive) to distribute all documents and for discussions about everything except logistics and “exceptional” technical discussions

This group uses Member-only, member-bpwg@w3.org (archive) strictly for discussions about logistics and “exceptional” technical discussions; all other discussion takes place on the public list.

Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Best Practices Working Group home page.

Decision Policy

As explained in the Process Document (section 3.3), this group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus. When the Chair puts a question and observes dissent, after due consideration of different opinions, the Chair should record a decision (possibly after a formal vote) and any objections, and move on.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter for the Best Practices Working Group has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

This charter has been extended:

On 16 November 2010, until 31 December 2010 (announcement)
On 20 July 2010, until 31 October 2010 (announcement)
On 8 January 2010, until 30 June 2010 (announcement)
On 2 July 2009, until 31 December 2009 (announcement)

Please also see the previous charter for this group.

$Date: 2010/12/13 09:28:40 $