W3C today issues standard best practices to create smarter mobile Web applications. The Mobile Web Application Best Practices offers practical advice from many mobile Web stakeholders for the easy development and the deployment of mobile Web applications that work across many platforms.

Whereas the recommendations of Mobile Web Best Practices focused on delivering a good experience on a broad range of devices, these new guidelines focus on boosting the overall mobile user experience, taking advantage of advanced device capabilities.

The Mobile Web Application Best Practices cards summarize the new standard in English and other languages.

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Mobile Web Application Best Practices. The document collects the most relevant engineering practices to aid the development of rich and dynamic Web application on mobile devices, promoting best practices that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful.

Comments are welcome through 19 November 2010.

Newly created Mobile Web Application Best Practices cards provide a quick reference guide to the Mobile Web Application Best Practices specification, whose goal is to aid the creation of rich and dynamic Web application on mobiles.

The 32 best practices defined in the specification are divided into 6 categories in the cards, ranging from « Spare the network » to « Set users free » and « Optimize response time ».

Web application developers willing to develop rich mobile Web applications are encouraged to bookmark the cards in their favorite browser (be it desktop or mobile), as well as to print and distribute copies of the cards (a PDF version is available).

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0.

Content Transformation proxies are mostly used to convert Web sites designed for desktop computers to a form suitable for mobile devices. This document provides guidance to these proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. The objective is to reduce undesirable effects on Web applications, especially mobile-ready ones, and to limit the diversity in the modes of operation of Content Transformation proxies, while at the same time allowing proxies to alter content that would otherwise not display successfully on mobile devices.

Implementors willing to claim conformance to the specification are invited to follow the instructions in the draft implementation report.

The W3C is delighted to announce the call for papers for its workshop on Augmented Reality on the Web. Augmented reality is a long standing topic in its own right but it has not been developed on the Web platform. As mobile devices become more powerful and feature-rich, the workshop will explore the possible convergence of augmented reality and the Web.

The objective of this W3C workshop Augmented Reality on the Web is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state of the art for AR on the Web, particularly the mobile platform, and what role standardization should play for Open Augmented Reality.

The workshop will take place at the Barcelona Tech University (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) on Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th June and is co-located with Mobile 2.0 that takes place the following day. This workshop is being run instead of the workshop that was due to take place in April as part of WWW2010 but is being organized in close association with the MobEA series.

See the Call for Papers and please join us in Barcelona!

The popular online training course: Introduction to W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices has been updated for 2010 and the first run is due to begin on Monday May 10th. Early Bird registration closes this Friday, 23 April

If you'd like to learn more about how to make your content available on the mobile channel, this course is for you! Lead by members of the MWI team, you'll:

• learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform;
• learn how to use W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to adapt existing content for mobile;
• learn client side and server side techniques for adapting your content to different classes of device.

Details of the course content, who will benefit from it most, and information to help you get an idea of what it's like to take this course are available.

The new deadline to submit short or full technical papers for the MobEA 2010 workshop on Augmented Reality Virtual Interactivity has been extended to 15 March 2010.

MobEA 2010 will focus on the topic of the convergence between augmented reality, virtual interactivity, and the Web. This 27 April 2010 workshop is co-located with the WWW2010 conference, in Raleigh, North Carolina. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state of the art for Mobile Augmented Reality (AR).

The W3C Mobile Web Initiative is advancing pervasive mobile computing through the adoption of standards and best practices. In the AR world now, there are diverging technologies and no standards insight, which will inevitably lead to customer confusion and industry gridlock. How does Web content need to evolve with AR? How do Web browsers need to evolve to become AR platforms? Find out about more interesting topics of discussion in the Call for Papers.

• Workshop: Augmented Reality on the Web. What is already possible and what needs to be done to clear any roadblocks to open AR on the Web? Papers, discussion and demos all welcome in Barcelona on 15 - 16th June in Barcelona. See the Call for Papers for more details.

The Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has just released a brand new Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers.

Based on the same idea of evaluating support of a number of Web technologies at a glance as in the first Web Compatibility Test published in July 2008, this second version features a number of more recent technologies that promise to make Web browsers more powerful, in particular on mobile devices.

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published today a third Last Call Working Draft of Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0.

This document provides guidance to Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. This third Last Call version incorporates changes made in response to comments on the second Last Call. The Working Group invites the community of Mobile Web developers to comment on this document through 11 March 2010. Please follow the instructions detailed in the Status of This Document section to provide feedback.

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group invites implementation of the W3C Candidate Recommendation of Mobile Web Application Best Practices.

The goal of this document is to aid the development of rich and dynamic mobile Web applications. It collects the most relevant engineering practices, promoting those that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful. W3C invites implementers to complete an implementation report template through 15 April 2010.

The Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group, part of the Mobile Web Initiative, has published a Group Note of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap. This document describes some of the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones. It suggests the most promising directions for lowering barriers to developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.

The review period for the two Last Call working drafts published by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group last month ends tomorrow. This is a reminder that the public community is invited to review and comment the drafts:

• The Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies provides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. This version is the result of returning the document to Last Call based on public feedback received during the first review period.
• The Mobile Web Application Best Practices specifies Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices.

Comments should be sent to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (with public archives). Thanks in advance!

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies. The document provides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content.

The document has already been published as a Last Call a year ago under the title "Content Transformation Guidelines", and has been updated based on feedback from reviewers. The Working Group invites the mobile developer community to review the draft once more and send feedback by 6 November 2009, sending comments to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (archive).

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of Mobile Web Application Best Practices. This document specifies Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices. The recommendations expand upon statements made in the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, especially concerning statements that relate to the exploitation of device capabilities and awareness of the delivery context.

The Working Group invites the mobile developer community to review the draft and send feedback by 6 November 2009, sending comments to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (archive).

As we noted recently it's uncertain whether it will be possible to run the successful online training course An Introduction to W3C Mobile Web Best Practices next year. We've received a great deal of positive feedback from previous students so if you want to make sure you don't miss the opportunity of taking this course with W3C, sign up today!

The course begins on Monday 12th October and will run through to Friday 11th December, during which time you will:>

• learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform;
• learn how to use W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to adapt existing content for mobile;
• discover the relevant W3C resources for mobile Web design.

You work at times to suit you with no specific time when you need to be online so you can take the course no matter what time zone you're in. The sign-up system uses PayPal which takes care of most world currencies without any difficulty.

For more details of the course content and who will benefit most from it, please see the dedicated page.

The Live Introduction to W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course scheduled for Wednesday 14th October at the Møller Centre, Cambridge, is attracting more and more interest. However it's clear that the price of the event is a barrier to students, freelancers and small companies. As part of its MobiWeb 2.0 project, co-funded by the EU's FP7 Programme, W3C is able to offer a maximum of 30 free places for the course. For some, there really such a thing as a free lunch!

If you believe that you should benefit from one of these free places, please e-mail Phil Archer and make your case! W3C members, as well as past, present and future registered participants in the online course are automatically allocated a place if requested.

Participants in the day will:

• Meet the tutors (Phil Archer and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux) and your fellow participants in the course;
• spend time in a mixture of lectures and informal workshop sessions where you can try out different solutions and share ideas;
• learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform;
• gain practical experience of turning desktop content into mobile content;

Guest speaker Paul Berney, Managing Director Europe of the Mobile Marketing Association, will speak about the exciting developments in marketing via mobile. Full details of the event are available.

The Introduction to Mobile Web Best Practices course that began in September is running well with over 100 participants. As we had to turn several people away after registration had closed, and it's uncertain at this stage whether we'll be able to offer the course again next year, we're squeezing in one more run of the online course before the end of the year.

Full details of the course - the content, the timing, who it's for and more is available.

Registration is now open for a new run of the the online course beginning on Monday 12th October and ending on Friday 11th December.

Meanwhile the Early Bird period for the live version of the course is running out. Set for Wednesday 14th October in Cambridge, UK, this is your chance to meet and learn from the W3C experts in person. We're delighted that Paul Berney, Managing Director Europe, of the Mobile Marketing Association has confirmed that he will be our guest speaker. Paul is at the forefront of maximizing the potential of the mobile channel and will share valuable insights on how mobile users can be reached and engaged most effectively.

But if you want the early bird price you'll have to hurry - you have until this Friday, 25th September to register.

So, you choose - the online version or the live version. Either way, come and learn the mobile Web with W3C!

The Digital World Forum (DWF) EU project is holding its closing event on Wednesday 30 September 2009, in Brussels, Belgium. The goal of this one-day event, free of charge, is to present the project's findings and to recommend future directions of work to help bridge the digital divide. The DWF project partners have explored the use of low-cost technologies to "connect the unconnected", such as mobile Web for development (MW4D), low-cost access devices, and low-cost broadband infrastructure. Read the press release and register online!