Mobile web standards

18 Jun 2004

Remember the days before web standards were taken seriously? Remember pages full of JavaScript if...else statements and document.write? Remember having to test your pages on umpteen number of browsers? Remember Netscape 4?

Thanks to the efforts of Jeffrey Zeldman and the Web Standards Project, those days are largely behind us but if the masochist in you longs to relive them again, develop for the mobile web.

While the excellent work of the WURFL project and WALL is commendable, it merely provides a mechanism for using the same if...else techniques with mobiles. Mobile web browser vendors need to stop just talking about web standards and start supporting them as well.