Mobile web

Three things have me thinking about the mobile web this week: Google changing their search results slightly, the Apple Watch shipping, and a question I was asked on GroupServer Development.

Google has changed the search results that it presents mobile devices: now sites that look bad will be poorly ranked. I was surprised that sites that looked bad were highly ranked to begin with.

The Apple Watch shipped this week. The Watch cannot show web-pages, or links for that matter. It even shows the plain-text version of an email, rather than the HTML version. However, it must be a matter of time before pages are shown on the small screens of wearable device. Then people will wonder how to build pages for such small devices. However, we did it once before, with the browsers (like Opera Mini) in feature phones, and some of us kept on supporting small screens.

Finally, I was shocked this week to be asked if GroupServer was mobile ready. I suppose that is the problem with responsive web design: it has absolutely no affordance.