The mobile Internet - or, the World Wide Web that you can get on your cellphone or handheld device - has had an incredibly lengthy and labored gestation.
Around the turn of the century, it was widely heralded by the telecommunications industry, only to be widely derided by consumers for being slow, cumbersome and generally useless.
Today, it is still sometimes slow and occasionally cumbersome, but the portable Internet is no longer useless. On a recent-model mobile phone, you can navigate to almost any Web site at an almost-reasonable speed and a not-too-outrageous cost, once you sign up for a data plan with your phone company. You can get and send e-mail from your regular accounts. For consumers, it is convenient and cool; for business users, it can be a critical mobile tool.
But it is still a far cry from using the Internet on a personal computer. And that is one reason for the Mobile Web Initiative, developed by the research, academic and technology group called the World Wide Web Consortium. Last month, a group of 19 mobile phone-related companies got together in London with the Massachusetts-based consortium, called W3C for short, to hash out how to make the mobile Net a well-oiled machine.
One of their goals is to come up with a list of "best practices" for all the companies in the mobile Internet food chain to follow. That chain includes phone makers, developers of software for phone browsers and e-mail, mobile phone carriers and the companies that put together Web pages to begin with.
So what is the ideal way to reduce a Web site to a two-inch screen? I know it sounds a bit preachy to say, since I could not design a mobile Web page to save my life, but it really is no more than common sense: Do not use large graphics. Do not use background images. Do use short titles. Do not use frames or tables.
All of these tricks, useful on a PC, are at the very least a pain when working in miniature and without a mouse, and when every byte involved in getting a page to appear costs you money, as it does with most mobile data plans.
Here are some of the W3C’s best practices for squishing the Internet into a handheld: