Luca Passani, of Openwave and WURFL made this post Friday to the wmlprogramming Yahoo! Group:
Last week I decided to stop contributing to the Best Practice document.
Without going into too much detail, the main reason why I decided to
abandon is that I didn't find the objective of the group to be clear
enough. In particular, I had joined the group under the assumption that
they were going to write guidelines about how to create content for
mobile devices. Alas, this was not the case.
Some group members think that the objective is to write guidelines *for
web authors* who intend to make their content easy to be transformed
into mobile content through adaptation proxies, while others still (and
this is the position that bugs me the most) believe that it's possible
to create guidelines that address both web and mobile web development in
one shot in the name of some so-far-not-better-defined "One Web".
To me, the lack of a clear objective was a show stopper. I believe that
nothing valuable for developers can be obtained by building on such
vague assumptions. This is painfully visible in the first draft, since
many recomendations are IMO either banal, plain wrong or even
contradictory. Mainly for this reason, I decided to stop contributing to
the draft.
Having said this, I invite members of WMLProgramming to use some time to
review the document and post their comments to
public-bpwg@... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-bpwg/. The reason why you
should do it is that, at the end of the day, this is a W3C document. If
you ignore it, you may find it in front of you on some projects where
the customer, for whatever reasons, will demand that you adhere to these
guidelines. At that point, it will be to hard to complain :)
Thanks
Luca
I highly encourage you to visit the group and read the rest of the thread. If you don't think you need to, please re-read Luca's last 2 sentences again. Even if you think you are not a mobile developer, if you consider yourself a web developer, then you are a mobile developer.