As usual, much is happening in the mobile web space. Recent discussions of progressive enhancement, media queries, lazy desktop web developers, cool javascript frameworks etc. are all very good and bring the mobile web business to new levels.

In my humble opinion, the missing link in this discussion is connectivity. The new trends in mobile web development seem to assume that the end user is surfing on WiFi or a 3G/4G connection with a fixed price data plan. Even if mobile surfing over WiFi is increasing and fixed price data plans are quite popular, this is no reason for ignoring the connectivity dimension when talking about creating web sites for the mobile context.

• Most users are not on WiFi
• 3G coverage is generally poor
• Data is still expensive (most people have to pay their own phone bill…)
• You never know the real bandwidth.
• 2G/2,5G is still widely used.

So, my frustration is that even sites made for mobile, does not work very well when I am on the road or traveling. My phone bill is also complaining about this…

The reasons are of course that way to much data is sent over slow networks to the data hungry mobile web sites. Why?

• Connectivity and bandwidth is not an issue when creating desktop web sites => the developer assumes that bandwidth is not an issue.
• Developers develop for, and test on, their own WiFi connected iPhone.
• It is difficult to tell the actual bandwidth (especially on the client side using javascript)
• “Mobile web apps” tend to use more http connections (ajax, external resources etc)
• Huge amounts of overhead, unused css, JavaScript and markup.

Another issue that is worth mentioning is that mobile devices often loose connection. They switch between being online and offline (Not only when driving through a tunnel, but also when bandwidth is so low that the browser stops rendering a page). The good news is that this can (kind of) be handled on the client side by JavaScript and navigator.onLine, local storage, application cache and all the other new cool HTML5-ish stuff. What I miss with all the new and fancy mobile .js libraries popping up is the connection issue should be given just as much attention as enabling fancy transitions and animation! It doesn’t matter how fancy, smooth and responsive the animations and transitions are if the site it self is slow and suffering from too much data over a slow connection.

The problem is increasingly relevant as more tablet sized sites and web apps are launched. Bigger screens means more data over the air. But what if the iPad is a on 3G with poor signal quality? Even worse experience than on a mobile phone…

You might see where I am going here… I kind of agree with Daniel Hunt over at MobiForge. You can’t fix everything client side with .js and media queries. With media queries you serve lots of style irrelevant to the context, and potentially lots of markup and content with “display:none;” for mobile presentation. Server side magic is still needed to decide what the server should send to the client to ensure a good user experience.

So, dear desktop web developers longing for mobile web tooling and with youthful urge to create mobile web sites: Don’t rely only on media queries and a fancy .js framework. Mobile web is still slightly more complex than that… Not that I have the solution… wish I had… Do you?