This blog and curriculum are dedicated to teaching standards-based mobile web development to audiences of web programmers and designers familiar with desktop web paradigms. Mobile is a totally different medium! Best practices for the desktop web simply do not apply to mobile.

If you are desktop web designer or developer, welcome to a thrilling and peculiar new world.

Learn the Mobile Web explores topics in mobile web development, including markup fundamentals, content adaptation, device recognition and mobile browser technology. We study and critique mobile standards and best practices authored by the W3C, dotMobi and similar organizations. This blog is my way of sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid when developing broadly portable mobile web applications.

About Me

I am Gail Rahn Frederick, a mobile software architect, mobile web enthusiast and instructor of standards-based mobile web development. My mobile applications and mobile web sites have been deployed to 10+ mobile operators in 6+ countries in North America and Europe. At Learn the Mobile Web, I teach and write about mobile markup languages, mobile design and usability, content adaptation, best practices and defensive programming for the mobile ecosystem. At Medio Systems, I lead a mobile software team developing search and discovery products for operators and publishers.

I live in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Public Speaking and Consulting

I am selectively available for public speaking and consulting on Mobile Web, mobile applications and mobile industry topics. I also teach my Mobile Web Development courses to private companies and organizations. Contact me for details and availability.

About My Mobile Web Development Classes

I created the Mobile Web Development curriculum and teach it as two courses at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon:

• Mobile Web Development is an introductory class for web developers and designers that teaches the basics of creating content for the mobile web.
• Advanced Mobile Web Development for Smartphones teaches advanced techniques for creating rich and interactive mobile web sites for smart mobile browsers that support full HTML, Javascript and AJAX.

My Publications and Presentations

Here is a sampling of my recent mobile industry publications and presentations:

• Beginning Smartphone Web Development: Building Javascript, CSS, HTML and Ajax-Based Applications for iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 by Gail Rahn Frederick and Rajesh Lal. Published by Apress, December 2009.
• Targeting smartphone apps for mass-market users, first article in an occasional mobile development series at FierceDeveloper.com, February 2010.
• Smartphone Behavior on a Featurephone Budget. Birds of a Feather talk on Mobile Track at JavaOne 2009. Previewed at Portland CodeCamp, May 2009.
• A Standards-Based Approach to Mobile Web Development. Mobile Portland monthly meet-up, March 2009, Portland CodeCamp, May 2009.
• Just Say “Britney Spears”: Multi-Modal Search and On-Device Portals. Lightning Talk at Sun’s Mobile and Embedded Developer Days, January 2009. Sun Developer Network Technical Article, March 2009.
• Benefits of a Mobile Markup Architecture. Poster presentation at Sun’s Java ME Developer Days, January 23 – 24, 2008.
• Mobile Search Ecosystem: The Role of Content Feed and Metadata Standards by Jai Jaisimha, Matt Ward-Steinman, Gail Rahn Frederick and Preethi Ramani. Paper presented at IEEE WOWMOM 2007 in Helsinki, Finland, June 20, 2007.