Accessibility Toolkit

Forget the mobile web: One site should work for all

Bruce Lawson

Published: 05 Mar 2009 13:18 GMT

...the content to fit into one column, or allow users to zoom into content without any input from the developer.

That's the nature of the One Web: make a single site, send a suggested display and accept that users will customise to their heart's content.

Some intelligent browsers make the One Web reality by transcoding and compressing content to reduce data costs and waiting time [disclosure: I work for Opera, the maker of Opera Mini, which performs these tasks].

Content display decisions
Some people dislike these mobile browsers. It is fundamentally wrong, they argue, that browsers rearrange or reformat content; the content provider has the ultimate right to decide how the content is displayed. This is anachronistic nonsense. Pixel-perfect rendering is PDF, not the web.

Of course, you own the intellectual-property rights to your content, but you can't dictate display. Users have always been able to resize text or override fonts. Screen-readers turn text into speech. Print stylesheets reformat pages and strip out nav bars that are no use on paper. Search engines and mash-ups rearrange content. That's what the web does.

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The best objection I've heard to the idea that one website can serve all devices is the argument that some content is more suited to mobile devices and some is more suitable for desktops.

The most common examples are of restaurants and travel websites. On phones, people simply want to find out opening times and the address of their favourite eatery, or whether their train is running late. And Nielsen is right when he says "bloated pages hurt users". But that's not an argument for a separate mobile version; it's an argument for slimming down the flabby desktop site.

What desktop visitors value
Desktop visitors largely dislike restaurants' immersive brand experience and choose 'skip intro'. They don't value the big picture of the train company's bearded chief executive, grinning broadly. Just like mobile users, desktop users are task-focused. The best way to ensure repeat visits is to make sure you don't waste visitors' time when they are with you.

If your site really, really needs a mobile version — perhaps your users are stuck with ancient browsers or you're doing something unimaginably special — do not lock your users in. Offer them the choice of which version they receive.

For 99 percent of sites, content that is good for mobiles is good content, full stop, and should be served to desktop users, too. Media queries are the way to save time and money by writing one site to run across devices. Device-specific sites for disabled people disappeared as browsers and web standards improved.

Let's hope history repeats itself for the mobile web.

Bruce Lawson works as an open-web-standards evangelist for Opera. He has been involved in standards and accessibility since 2002. The views expressed in this column are his own. You can follow him on Twitter.