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One of the most interesting workshops I followed in 2004 was the W3C “Mobile Web Initiative” Workshop in Barcelona. I learned about managing the complexity in technology innovation between different mobile value chain players and collaboration processes in order to define standards that suits all. But also I heard many good new ideas for the first time there (RSS feed use on the mobile for example), and of which some are currently completely integrated, you can still read the Position Papers presented at that workshop.

Some outcome of these excellent W3C initiatives is the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group. The recently chartered Working Group is seeking public feedback on one of its proposed deliverables : an open testing framework for the Mobile Web, testing mobile web user agents for the benefits of mobile web developers.
The overall goal of such a framework would be to allow the community to understand better how mobile web user agents available today react to various authoring practices (CSS tricks, javascript compatibility, advanced markup techniques, etc).

To that end, the Test Suites Working Group is looking at setting up a framework that would allow:

• anybody to submit test cases that they think would help assess support of a specific technical point in user agents; a few groups and individuals have already started to collect some of these tests cases, and the Working Group would like to serve as a point of collection and development for these

• anybody to submit test results based on the above mentioned test cases

• anybody to consult the statistical results posted by the community; these could hopefully lead at the creation of compatibility tables as some have been developed in the “desktop browser” world

The Working Group would review, select and possibly amend the test cases submissions to produce a blessed test suite that would get most of th focus, but may still hosts the other test cases in case they would help a more restricted community.

Before investing the time and effort required to make such a system possible, the Working Group would like to get feedback on this project, in particular to see how many of Web developers would be interested in contributing to that project, as well as using its results.

To that end, they have set up a fairly short survey that shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to answer. The survey is open until March 16 (until further notice), so Mobile Web developers, head over to participate to the survey and add your grain to the evolution of the Mobile Web.

The W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative just anounced the new service “Planet Mobile Web”, which goal is to reinforce the community building around the Mobile Web usage, create discussions across blogs, generate new ideas, etc. The Planet provides both an aggregated HTML view and aggregated RSS/Atom feeds.

Planet Mobile Web aggregates posts from various blogs that concern the Mobile Web. While it is hosted by the Mobile Web Initiative, the content of the individual entries represent only the opinion of their respective authors of course.

I think this is a great initiative to stimulate the discussion between the various mobile global value chain players in the field. I am happy I am included in the lists of blogs, I will definately keep contributing and writing on this topic in the future. Check it out!