Automatic Evaluation of Mobile Web Pages
Abstract
The use of mobile devices to access the information on the World Wide Web is
growing rapidly. The growth has created a surge in the number of webpages being
designed for mobile devices. In order to support efficient mobile browsing, some markup
languages (e.g., WML and XHTML Mobile Profile) and standards (Mobile Web Best
Practices) have been developed to specifically support the rendering of information on
mobile devices. Evaluating the mobile webpages manually against the guidelines requires a
tremendous amount of work. This research paper focuses on automatic evaluation of
mobile webpages, a process which offers many advantages in terms of saving time,
reducing costs and many others.
In this paper, an extensive inspection of the 46 most popular mobile websites,
according to Mobile Web Best Practices using MobileOK checker [WMC09], has been
conducted. The results have been provided and analyzed to make specific and general
suggestions to improve the design and development of mobile websites. We believe that
the analysis will help developers produce more user-friendly mobile websites while
considering the Mobile Web Best Practices. Furthermore, the paper also presents a generic
approach to represent the W3C Mobile Web Guidelines as an XML schema, which
provides flexibility to design rule schemas in an open format; the schemas can be added to
an automated tool that is used to evaluate the mobile webpages. The XML schema can also
be used to redesign the rule if there is a change in the guidelines.