When I hear “last call,” I typically rush to the bar and place a few drink orders before the bartender shuts down the flow of alcohol to its belligerent patrons. But in the case of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announcing last call on HTML5 – what does it mean? We’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid spiked with HTML5 for quite some time, and are drunk with hallucinations that it will solve all of the world’s problems. So if we’re already intoxicated, what’s the point of last call?

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and all of its flavors, is a victim of its own success. It made a relatively easy process out of creating and sharing information across the Internet. Millions of people now use it to develop Web sites. With that many developers, everyone wants to have a say in its future direction. The W3C is not only the governing body, but its director, Tim Berners-Lee, is the author of the first version of HTML. The 61 members of the W3C team have the arduous responsibility of making decisions that impact not only millions of developers that utilize the language, but also billions of users that see the results produced by HTML.

HTML 4.0 went to recommendation status on December 18, 1997. That was nearly a year before Google was formed in September 1998. The Web was a very different place at that time, and the mobile Web wasn’t even a consideration when HTML 4.0 went to recommendation. What took so long to get to HTML5? Part of the reason is that the W3C was taking a different path in the last decade – something the mobile Web got trapped in with variations of the language such as XHTML. But the sheer size of the affected parties and the revenue impacts that it has on the companies that support the Web created a political environment that makes it challenging to certify a standard the way that it was in the beginning.

(more…)

Fathers Day. A great time to focus on family. And for those lucky enough to still have dad around – time to determine what gift to give. I know that over the years we gave my dad a full complement of ties, books, and anything with the New York Mets logo. My dad has been gone for a few years now and he was not a technology guy. He preferred a typewriter to a PC, and never had a cell phone. My mom on the other hand, recently traded in her flip phone for an iPhone 4 (to go along with her MacBook). I even helped her load the ING Direct banking app yesterday. If my dad were still with us, would he have jumped onto the smartphone bandwagon?

I’ve commented in prior postings about the convergence of consumer and enterprise technologies – specifically around mobility. This is not a new trend, nor do I take credit for identifying it. As I’m in daily conversations with business and IT leaders in major enterprises regarding mobile strategies, I hear the impact on the enterprise technology world. I do believe that following these trends will provide insight regarding employee and consumer expectations for mobility.

Considering what was promoted for Father’s Day 2011, I notice a very interesting and somewhat subtle change. In past years, there was a great amount of focus around purchasing dad a device for Father’s Day. It was all about, “Give dad an iPad, Tablet, Droid, iPhone…. for Father’s Day.” The device was the gift. While the idea of giving dad a device has not disappeared, the vision is expanding.

(more…)

Mobile vision includes deciding - mobile app, or mobile Web?

If you’ve been a frequent reader of Mobile Masters, you’ve probably noticed that many of us spend a good deal of our ink communicating things like vision and planning. It’s not just that we all have the same one-track mind – this stuff is important. For many customers who know they have mobility needs, the task of moving forward can seem quite daunting. It helps if you create your mobility vision first.

The mobility world is complicated. You have users that are out of sight and often nearly impossible to control. You have a broad spectrum of mobile devices to contend with, and you have an ever increasing number of business challenges that could probably use a well-crafted mobile solution to help address them. No matter how you slice it, things are complicated and they’re not getting any easier any time soon. So what do you do to prevent yourself from imploding under all the pressure? Create your mobile vision as a first step.

In past blog posts I have harped on planning and doing a bit of analysis to help focus on the most important things first. That puts you on the right path for the projects you are aware of, but what about the unanticipated stuff that could be lurking down the road? What would happen if you had a tremendously successful new product launch? What would the impact on the organization be? How could mobility help? What if the opposite occurred and you had a product recall? Could the same mobile vision help address these challenges too? Maybe.

(more…)