Disposition of comments for the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group

3.4.5.1
This is a dangerous recommendation when even modern browsers like
mobile safari on iPhone have a limited browser cache entry size of
25kb uncompressed. It is a good recommendation but relies partially on
the assumption that the caching of a single large resource is no worse
than multiple single resources.

3.3.1.2
AFAIK some devices will provide UI indications in their status bar of
network activity, with a spinner or mobile data flow indicators. While
informing users of background network usage may be desirable, it might
be overkill to have 3 separate indicators. Maybe you could suggest to
provide UI on devices where the browser does not do it natively

3.4.10
Although this is a different point to 3.1.1 they are related and maybe
should be merged, colocated or reference each other

3.1.1.1
Cookies being disabled by devices isn't a mobile specific issue as it
also applies to desktop. New devices Android, iPhone, Nokia s60 and
beyond, Palm, etc.. all ship with cookies enabled by default.
Maybe it is covered elsewhere but there is no mention of privacy
issues sending data back to the server via cookies, only the network
concern. With access to very sensitive data like location this might
be worth flagging for mobile.

Re Status of the Document (SotD) section: given this document is
purely non-normative, why is this document "expected to become a W3C
Recommendation" rather than a Working Group note? For example, how
would this document ever be able to meet the following entrance
criteria for Proposed Recommendation:

[[
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#cfr

2. Shown that each feature of the technical report has been implemented.
]]

Re the use of "Non-Normative" in the titles of Appendix A and B:
given the SotD clearly states the document is non-normative, it seems
a bit redundant to restate it in the titles [hint: delete "(Non-
Normative)".

3.1.2.1
Given that HTML5 is now drafting specs for a Web Storage and Web
Database that is shipping in iPhone 3.x and Android 2.x it seems odd
to me to mention Bondi and Opera widgets in this context, especially
given the focus of this document is for applications in a browser.
The second point of "making updates locally at first" should be
supplemented with a need to add UI treatment to make it clear to the
user that their data is uncommitted.

3.2.1.2
One way to be able to eval() untrusted data is to perform the JSON
escaping on the server where the processing power is less constrained
than on the client since we are downloading the data anyway
(presumably).

3.3.1.1
nit: double period at the end of first sentence

3.3.2.2
"must" seems a bit strong here. Some applications that inherently
require network access (think IM, mapping, etc..) will not be usable
with no network access, so providing such an option should not be
mandatory.

3.3.4
Consider adding something along the lines of
"If devices persist authentication tokens then the server MUST
invalidate them if the user changes or resets their password"
This is especially important with mobile devices that are often
lost/stolen and provides a user with a way to after the fact lock the
phone out of web applications it had previously been authorised for.

3.4.4.2
One suggestion to add here is to prioritise your network requests and
throttle the number of connections in order to ensure that high
priority requests are not blocked or slowed by lower priority
requests, if they are unable to be batched.

3.4.11
I don't like this recommendation.
What does "reasonable" mean? What about "manageable"?
What is a 10Mb DOM?
How should people measure it?
Why was this value chosen? (Recent high end browser handle much larger DOMs)

It is unclear what the recommendation to "Clip content and separate
content onto separate pages" means.
Are you saying to make top level URL changes to download new pages
(and parse new JS)? If you are I think that is a bad recommendation as
the latency hit is quite bad.
Typically a better solution is to rather than hide non visible DOM
elements, to instead remove these elements from the DOM altogether and
recreate them as needed.

3.5.1.1
App Cache link should now point to: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html

3.5.1.2
I like these recommendations. Good stuff.

One thing you could add is to initiate any network requests before JS
parsing begins, so that the network request is in flight while the
parse occurs. This can work well for applications that require fresh,
rather than, cached data to be useful as it parallelises the network
request and JS parse.

3.5.4
The tone of this recommendation is odd. I agree that the user
shouldn't be warped away from their current view but there are cases
where programatically setting the focus is very desirable if the next
user action is expected to be character input and setting the focus in
these cases should be recommended.

3.5.6.2
Maybe a mention of the format of the number used in the tel: URI
A best practice is to use a full international number prefixed by +
and a country code.
This is recommended in the RFC so it isn't necessary to include it
here, but it is currently quite common for people to use tel: URIs
with only local numbers that don't work in a different calling prefix
or different country.

3.5.11.2
Setting minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0 has accessibility impacts
as it usually makes it impossible to manually zoom into the screen,
which can be useful for visually impaired users.

3.6.3.2
Class 2 and 3 are very similar, the difference being the advanced APIs
available in class 3. For example, the iPhone v2.0 browser was class 2
and v3.0 is class 3 by your classification. Typically these
differences don't require different variants, the class 3 device just
has a richer and faster experience. A more useful axis is touch screen
v non touch screen.

3.6.4
There was no mention of <noscript>. Is this deliberate?

3.6.4.2
Are we really recommending to send the user back a HTTP error code
that essentially provides no information to the user as to why their
request is "Not Acceptable". I understand this may be the 'correct'
behaviour, but the UX it results in is hideous.