Planning for Mobile Web Students Project

I was very fortunate to be at Web Directions South 2007 conference this year.
The event was extremely informative and productive in particular in regards to our M-Learning project - Brian Flings Mobile 2.0 talk and workshop “Mobile web design and development” which covered everything you need to know about creating sites for the mobile web from start to finish.

Here is a quick summary of Mobile 2.0 presentation:

1. 1 billion people have mobile devices - this vastly outnumbers the PC
2. The iphone is the first mobile web 2.0 devices. It supports CCS 3
3. Mobile widgets are the next big thing
4. AJAX on the mobile is the next frontier
5. Mobile web apps are the future

Brian convinced that iphone equipped with latest Safari 3 browser opens up new era for mobile web development - mobile web 2.0. Equally capable to deliver great user experience and having all the functionality of PC based web; mobile web 2.0 has great advantage – your phone aware about its location hence you can receive contextual data and service for example see location of your friends, receiving information about local services, events etc.
The current trend in mobile web development is:

1.  merge of Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0
2. use of web standards in mobile
3. designing for the mobile context    

From Brian’s workshop and from other WDS presentations as well as from industry participants feedback I learned that foundational skills set required for mobile web developer is not that different from what is compulsory for the conventional front end designer /developer:

• Understanding of semantic XHTML, HTML mark-up
• Strong CSS
• Understanding of web standards and accessibility
• Basic JavaScript
• Basic knowledge of microformats

Offcourse to create functional and successful mobile website developer have to learn mobile specific skills like:

• planning mobile web strategy
• integrate web and mobile technologies
• employ mobile web design principles
• apply mobile development practices
• implement mobile standards and best practices
• create a mobile information architecture
• conduct mobile usability testing
• work with mobile service provider requirements
• analyse content adaptation strategies
• understand location-based services
• understand messaging services

Examples of mobile web 2.0 sites developed specifically for iphone by Brian’s company blueflavor.com available on http://getleaflets.com/screenshots/

Unfortunately unlike for conventional web development there are little or no textbooks on the topic yet. To develop mobile web brief and set of tutorials for students requires a lot of work and research as well as interesting Mobile Idea and original content.

Here is a list of useful web resources on the topic:

.mobi Developers Guide http://dev.mobi
Global Authoring Practices for Mobile web http://www.passani.it/gap/
.mobi Mobile Ready http://mr.dev.mobi
iPhone for Web Developers http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
XHTML Mobile Profile Tutorial http://www.developershome.com/wap/xhtmlmp/

Feedback and comments are welcome and appreciated!