XML News from Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The W3C Content Transformation Task Force has posted the last call working draft of Content Transformation Landscape 1.0:

From the point of view of this document, Content Transformation is the manipulation in various ways, by proxies, of requests made to and content delivered by an origin server with a view to making it more suitable for mobile presentation.

The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group neither approves nor disapproves of Content Transformation, but recognizes that is being deployed widely across mobile data access networks. The deployments are widely divergent to each other, with many non-standard HTTP implications, and no well-understood means either of identifying the presence of such transforming proxies, nor of controlling their actions. This document establishes a framework to allow that to happen.

The overall objective of this document is to provide a means, as far as is practical, for users to be provided with at least a "functional user experience" [Device Independence Glossary] of the Web, when mobile, taking into account the fact that an increasing number of content providers create experiences specially tailored to the mobile context which they do not wish to be altered by third parties. Equally it takes into account the fact that there remain a very large number of Web sites that do not provide a functional user experience when perceived on many mobile devices.