The longer term

W3C Standards work has started

On 19 July 2007 in London at the “best working practices” W3C meeting Vodafone and others started a working group on tackling the standards issues created by the content adaptation. The work is moving with speed to produce recommendations using current tags and headers where possible to resolve the issues highlighted. This work has the brief to come up with recommendations to work with proxy servers such as Vodafone’s WTE and other proxy servers .It will also tackle how to recognise and work with mobile content verses standard web pages. This is an end to end issue from the browser on the mobile phone through to the adaptation server to the end user content.

You can follow the work at the W3C by going here

Content Aggregator advice

At the moment if you are a content aggregator or in the content business Vodafone recommends that you do nothing but follow the work published in these pages. The technical enhancements to the WTE will be made to add new functionality during August. The work in the standards bodies will continue until a recommendation can be made on how adaptation servers, mobile devices and content can interact in a new ecosystem. However Vodafone would like to have early feedback on the topics discussed here so please feel free to express your opinions.

Feedback

We would like to hear from you whether you are a customer, content provider, developer or content aggregator. Please provide your feedback by using the blog on this website. Let us know what you think of the service and the proposed changes and standards direction to recognise mobile web sites. If you maintain content on a web site we are very interested to know what you think of the proposals. You can do this by using the Betavine Forum for 'Mobile and Internet Content Services'.