DevWebPro

Launch of the Mobile Web Initiative will make browsing by mobile as easy as using a PC web browser.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), announced the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) in Japan.

"Mobile access to the Web has been a second class experience for far too long," he explained. "MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile Web experience worthwhile."

Modern devices like cellphones have Web browsers, but their use has been inconvenient. Many web sites do not display properly on a mobile device. Content developers have no standard of development that will let them create content usable on a majority of mobile platforms.

Two parts comprise the initiative. One will be best practices, which will develop some common guidelines to help content providers ensure their creations work well on most mobile platforms. The other part will be device descriptions, a database of information that will allow developers to customize content for a particular device.

Mr. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a way for scientists to easily share data, including images, across the Internet. The effort quickly spread to other areas, and now billions of web pages have been created by a range of providers, from individuals to the world's biggest corporations and governments.