Mobile-friendly Is Not So Friendly
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A mobile-friendly version of the New York Times can now be viewed with a PDA or mobile phone with web-browsing capabilities. The NYT announced the new site can be found at http://mobile.nytimes.com.
Japan’s wireless consumers often have 3G connectivity, can receive several digital (not analog) television channels, and their phones can easily be used as electronic wallets and GPS devices. US consumers tend to be multi-device users.
Mobile-friendly sounds so welcoming. Friendly has several meanings but ‘easy to understand or use’ as in ‘user-friendly computers’ or even ‘user-friendly websites’ sounds a most desirable attribute. That’s why a topic raised by William Slawski in the Cre8asite Forums is so intriguing: How does your site look on a PDA, Google PDA proxy? Several people there are concerned that their websites don’t look too good. Well that isn’t surprising. Making something friendly isn’t as easy as this little PDA Proxy might imply.
Even thought the Proxy sits on the Google website, it would seem that this is just someone trying out a bit of code. I’m not sure how Fortune Interactive found it, but there are no words of explanation. The URI, http://www.google.com/gwt/n, suggests that this was developed using some of the goodies in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The Google Web Toolkit is for people developing Google-related applications. In this case, the underlying premise of the Proxy seems to be wrong. Even if the website being tested has a PDA-friendly version by using a style-sheet appropriate for Handhelds, this is not what is tested by the Proxy. Instead it takes the version styled for Desktops and shows how this would be displayed on a PDA.
The One Web Principle sets as an objective that content provided by accessing a URI should yield a thematically coherent experience when accessed from different devices. This Principle does not rule out using different style sheets to give an extra flexibility in trying to deliver a satisfying user experience, whatever the device. Indeed it seems most unlikely that the same web page without style sheets could possibly be acceptable in radically different devices.
The first news item today mentions that the New York Times now has a mobile version. That seems to be the way that most people will handle this problem of the mobile world versus the desktop world. You’ll have one URI for the web page that works for desktop devices and another URI for mobile devices. The One Web Principle is just an impossible dream. If your desktop web page doesn’t look too good in that PDA proxy, then don’t worry about it. Perhaps the One Web Principle is not for you.
Related: Check out Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes for another interesting approach to this problem.
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