[General Topics] Menneisyys:
I have been a bit inactive lately (in the last 4-5 days), article writing-wise (of course, I tried not to neglect the Windows Mobile forums). In addition to some real-life work, the main reason for this was my being one of the speakers on a Budapest-based regional World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-organized conference, which required a lot of additional work (creating slides, deciding what to speak of, emphasize etc).

The main homepage of the conference is here (you can make a quick search for my name ;) ) - also linked in from the W3C homepage - see the “Next Event” (as of 10/19) box.

The conference was about the Mobile Web Initiative, which is all about how the Web can be made accessible on mobile devices as well. You can find more info on this stuff on the above-linked page. It’s pretty interesting stuff, particularly if you’re a webmaster and would like to know what the future brings (or may bring). In here, I won’t really explain what it’s all about. Upon popular request, I may summarize it (of course, adding professional insights and explanations) in a future article – feel free to tell me (publicly) if you’d interested in such a more of a ‘techie’ article.

You won’t guess: of course, I’ve lectured on the current Web (with very strong emphasis on my thorough tests of new, emerging technologies like Ajax) accessibility situations on Windows Mobile (and, to a much lesser degree, the Linux-based Sharp Zaurii – just comparing the Opera Mobile and NetFront implementations on the two platforms. Unfortunately, having no access to the also Linux-based Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, I couldn’t compare its browser to those on Windows Mobile).

I’ve taken a strong, “low-level” (that is, protocol-level) W3C-specific approach to the subject. That is, instead of, say, speaking about what features the user interface offers (does it support, for example, downloading link targets easily and so on), I mostly elaborated on compliance issues with current Web standards - that is, can a current Windows Mobile user access currently existing, non-mobile-optimized Web page (that is, the vast majority of current Web content).

Having only twenty minutes, you can guess in what depth (pretty shallow) I could elaborate on these questions – after all, it’d take me days to re-explain / show everything I’ve published about, as far as PPC Web browsers are concerned. Of course, as I’ve already published sometimes really lengthy articles, I referred the participants to these articles (see the Ref: NUMBER references in the presentation - they mostly refer to my articles in the Smartphone & Pocket PC Mag Expert blog). That is, I’ve run over all the main compatibility test subjects I’ve ever published a (notable) article on and explained in some sentences what they are all about.

To summarize my (of which the PowerPoint file you can also download – see the links section) lecture, I’ve proved the participants that Windows Mobile has excellent Web browsing capabilities – I’d say better than, not necessarily taking mobile Linux implementations into account, any other mobile platform.

The Nokia OSS browser – is it really as good as some state?

As far as the other speakers / lectures are concerned, there have been three speakers from Nokia too. They have demoed their latest S60-based Web browser, the famous OSS.

I’ve long been wanting to test this browser – so far, without success. I don’t have the money to get all the current toys and top models of competing OS’es. Even purchasing the latest & greatest Windows Mobile devices is sometimes hard to explain to my wife (“another toy – what for?”). Furthermore, being not really interested in Symbian, I don’t really have the “Hey, lend me your latest gadgets so I’ll write an article of it” relationship with the Nokia folks either.

Now, I’ve had the chance to play a bit with the new browser after the demo and, to tell the truth, wasn’t really impressed.

While OSS is based on indeed very strong and standards-compliant HTML and JavaScript engines* (Apple WebCore (KHTML) – Apple’s well-known Safari browser is also based on this – and JavaScriptCore, respectively), it lacks Flash (it only supports Flash lite, which is unable to play standard Flash animations) and Java applets (NOT JavaScript!).

What is even more important, while the way the OSS browser renders Web pages looks really cool on a high-resolution (for example Nokia E-series) screen (it’s like how Thunderhawk renders pages on QVGA Windows Mobile devices – very similar but even more readable, cool-looking, thin characters), it also suffers from the same problem as Thunderhawk: It doesn’t have a One Column (for PIEPlus users: “Pocket View”) mode. I’ve certainly seen some test pages (heavily packed with text in tables) that did require horizontal scrolling, the most important enemy of mobile Web users.

This is unlike all (except for, again, Thunderhawk) Pocket PC Web browsers (where I also count in PIEPlus’ Pocket View mode on pre-WM2003SE browsers), where One Column is present and supported.

Standards compliance-wise, as far as Pocket PC’s are concerned, both Minimo and Opera Mobile are based on really strong, desktop-quality HTML / JavaScript engines, just like Nokia's OSS. Also, Microsoft’s own PIE / IEMis getting better and better all the time (albeit its CSS support is still pretty weak). No, I’m not praising Microsoft's IEM because I’m a Microsoft MVP myself – in the pre-WM5 days, I wouldn’t have recommended PIE to anyone because of the low level of standards compliance and the bugs at all. Since WM2003SE, IEM has become far better than ever before and is, now (WM5 AKU2+), a decent alternative (particularly with PIEPlus) to both Minimo and Opera Mobile.

That is, if a Symbian fan tells you the OSS browser is more standards-compliant than any Pocket PC Web browser, just tell him or her it’s simply not true and refer him or her to my compliance reports. It’s pretty hard to debate with figures and facts ;).

The standards compliance rate of Windows Mobile is certainly admirable, particularly taking into the account the meager resources of Windows Mobile , both hardware- and developer manpower-wise. For example, Minimo is only developed by ONE programmer, for free and in his free time. Taking this into account the standards compliance Minimo can rightfully be called breathtaking.

All in all, I don’t think the Windows Mobile platform is weaker than Symbian as far as Web browsing is concerned – the Nokia OSS browser does have its share of (sometimes really acute) problems.

Personal Mobsite: Great remote controller / messaging capabilities!

There were some really cool tech demos at the conference, also by the Nokia folks. Their real (it was already running on their E-series devices and notebooks) “Personal Mobsite” demo, which is described here (the most important pages are in English; I recommend the 14th side the most), was pretty interesting – definitely worth implementing something similar on the Windows Mobile platform too. (As soon as I have some free time, I’ll definitely try to re-implement it or at least something similar on our platform.)

Additional threads / links of interest

You may also want to check out this, brand new, related thread over at PPCT on Web 2.0. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Mobile Web Initiative. Still, it contains some additional information on (future) compatibility issues - and my explanations on why the future isn’t so dark for us Windows Mobile users than some people try to make us think.

Here’s my PowerPoint presentation if interested. (Sorry for the non-English language. Still, it may be worth checking out at least the headers, the references and the screenshots to see what I’ve elaborated on – that is, what needs to be emphasized on the current HTTP / HTML / CSS / JavaScript / Ajax / Java / Flash etc. compliance of current Web browsers.)