Barely scratching the surface

Some days ago, TomSoft wrote an article discussing a few myths of the 'mobile Ajax'. I think many (including myself) share Thomas' view that it's important not to hype technologies, and that its important not to draw conclusions like 'the mobile web 2.0 equals mobile AJAX' (meaning that AJAX is something running in the browser). The Web 2.0 is a much broader term, and limit it to a single set of technologies does not make sense. He is also correct when stating the there are alternatives currently deployed on lots of mobile phones and that mobile AJAX is not a way to bypass the operators. In fact most of the interest in the world for Mobile AJAX solutions derives from Operators who are interested in superior user experiences across devices and medias.

What I question is the following:

Looks good, but unfortunately, I have no Ajax enabled browser out of the thousands of handsets we have here at MobileScope….

How you manage to have thousands of phones without an AJAX capable browser? Opera Mobile is estimated to ship on approximately 46 different handset model in 2006 and Nokia ships their new web browser on a significant model. This means that there are already millions of AJAX enabled mobile phone in the market.

Seems that the Write Once Run Anywhere myth is back!! It was actually already not achievable through technology designed for this, so I did not see how Ajax app (which is basically designed for one or two platform) will be able to address suddenly thousands of different platforms…..

I haven't heard anyone claim this anywhere. But we are in Opera reusing lots and lots of AJAX solutions on other devices than it was originally designed for. Whether SoonR in their demo reused any code from their PC version is not sufficient to argue otherwise.

As for Li Mikas comment in his blog:

So finally... OPERA mobile AJAX platform got themselves a partner... SOONR.com to develop a mobile ajax app running on their OPERA platform

This has nothing to do with Opera Platform. It's a standard AJAX application, that just happens to be running on a mobile phone rather than a PC. Opera Platform on the other hand is a full AJAX framework for creating user interfaces and applications with.

Summing up. The discussion points Thomas brings forward are very valid, but there is a clear difference between advocating for which technologies will succeed in the future and which ones are available today.

I have been writing a lot about dotmobi lately, asking for people to wake up and smell the coffee.
David Meyer from ZDNet seems to agree.

It's not going to make it any easier to access the content — in fact it will add a couple of keystrokes to what you're doing

- Windsor Holden, senior analyst with telecommunications consultancy Analysys

You don't need a separate domain to do that...Another mobile industry attempt to control something that's uncontrollable — another quasi-walled garden

- James Enck, analyst with Daiwa Securities

I'm sure more will follow.

or, let's get rid of prefixes and suffixes that are not technology agnostic.

The .mobi top-level domain initiative which was initiated by Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft, reports that more than 5000 domain names was registered within the first 2 days after launch. This is no surprise. Being late with registering a new domain name can turn very expensive.

But do we really need this new top-level domain name?

People like Russel Beattie has argued that we do need it. Today people refer to their "mobile friendly" version as for example wap.ebay.com, google.com/xhtml or even mobile.opera.com. These solutions are *really* bad because their not consistent. I believe that .mobi might help these companies clean this up.

My criticism however to .mobi is that it is not technology agnostic (like .com or .org or .dk). If we decide to add top level domains like this for every type of media, we might end up with many silly solutions like:

opera.mobi
opera.tv
opera.pda
opera.mp3 (music player, could easily be confused with a music format)
opera.ife (in-flight entertainment)

This is not a good solution to the problem. End users should not have to be aware of what type of device (or media) their on in order to find the right kind of content. People who for example wants to read news on CNN should simply go to CNN.com and find content for their device.

Luckily there are alternative solutions to domain names.

My personal favorite is to build web sites using CSS Media Types. This enables easy adaption of the content for different devices without expensive infrastructure.

To test out how this works in practise, simply click "View" - "Small Screen" on this page (using Opera off course). This will simply change the active CSS document, and make the page into a mobile friendly version.

Voila. Problem solved. And did I mention its free to use and supports plenty of other media like TV and projection (similar to Power Point)

Opera is working on making version 9 ready for mobile phones. One of the developers in the Symbian team in Opera recently posted a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the very advanced ACID2 test from WebStandards.org. The test was first passed by Safari from Apple before Opera passed it on desktop in March 2006. Opera for mobile is based on exactly the same rendering engine as the desktop browser and such all the good stuff will become available on millions of phones and other devices soon.

This is great news for web standards and for web developers!

Long live the web!