Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

The W3C‘s Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group have just announced a new suite of tests for mobile devices. In the spirit of the Acid tests, the test results are returned in an easily grokable visual manner—the green squares are desirable, the red squares mean a feature isn’t yet supported.

The URL you need to point your mobile device to is: http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html.

That’s a bit of a fingerful so there’s also this short version: http://tinyurl.com/37e33p.

But if that’s too hard to remember, i maded u a url: http://icanhaz.com/wt (let’s say it stands for “web test” but really I chose those letters because it’s short and they’re the first letters on the 9 and 8 keys of a T9 keyboard).

Or if your phone can read QR codes, give your fingers a rest and point your phonecam at this image.

Once you’ve tested your device, you can send a picture of the results to [email protected] and it will be added to the screenshot gallery. If you have any feedback on the test itself, join in the discussion on the group list: [email protected]. Be sure to read the test documentation first though.

On your marks, get set, test!

Your Replies

#1 On April 16th, 2008 9:43 am Chris Hester replied:

I know it’s not meant for desktop browsers, but perhaps the results are interesting when you try the mobile test on them. In the result I used a matrix counting left to right to indicate the squares:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12

The results are:

Opera 9.5 (Beta) – all green squares! But some red lines showing behind some.

Firefox 2 – mostly green. Red squares at positions 8, 9 and 12.

Firefox 3 (Beta 5) – same as Firefox 2, except squares 11 and 12 are not as tall as the rest.

IE8 – only the top line is green, the rest is red. Square 5 is missing altogether, and the browser tries to download an XHTML file at one point. Sigh!

Safari 3.1 – all green except square 9!

#2 On April 16th, 2008 10:45 am Adam Dempsey replied:

I was just about to submit a screenshot my from Nokia N95 and saw they already had one in the gallery!

#3 On April 16th, 2008 5:39 pm pauldwaite replied:

> green squares are desirable, the red squares mean a feature isn’t yet supported

That’s a relief. I seem to remember something on the Safari blog about one developer sending another a test page for an Acid3-related bug, and the guy spent ages trying to stop it displaying a red square, when that was actually the success indicator.

My iPhone Safari gets 3 red squares.

#4 On April 17th, 2008 8:04 am Tamlyn replied:

Interesting that Mobile safari on Nokia S60 passes the dynamic SVG test whereas desktop safari doesn’t. What does it mean if the square is green but has a little white ‘+’ symbol in the corner?

Incidentally this is the first time I’ve been able to use a QR code to save rather than waste time!

#5 On April 17th, 2008 8:12 am sohbet replied:

I will only believe it when IE renders and handles a button-tag correctly and doesn’t try to save application/xml local.

#6 On April 20th, 2008 2:07 am Lenny replied:

I will only believe it when IE renders and handles a button-tag correctly and doesn’t try to save application/xml local.

Um… you will only believe what when IE does that? What has that even got to do with any of this?

#7 On April 20th, 2008 3:39 pm David Storey replied:

The builds since Opera 9.5 beta pass the test fully (without the green lines). More importantly to the test, the upcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 beta also passes the test. Unfortunately Opera Mini doesn’t. It uses the same engine but doesn’t yet support SVG for efficiency reasons. I’m not sure why it fails the application/xhtml+xml test though. Probably something to do with the iframe.

#8 On April 21st, 2008 9:14 pm Jordan Clark replied:

Slightly off topic, but am I the only person who’s getting a 404 error when trying to access this page from the WaSP home page?

When I removed the last trailing slash from the URL manually, it worked. Just thought I’d let you know…

#9 On May 1st, 2008 9:25 pm Dave replied:

I have to say whomever wrote that headline should be working at a newspaper writing headlines instead of spending their time checking code. Quite catchy for a developer.

#10 On June 11th, 2008 10:14 pm Paul Martin replied:

Are there any results with all green?

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