14 DAY TRIAL // The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a long history of supporting developers with tools that help them adhere to its standards. A few days ago, the W3C dev team released a new tool to complete its Developer Tools offering, called the Mobile Checker.
As the name hints, this product is aimed at professionals working on mobile projects or webmasters trying to port their existing desktop website to work on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
The W3C Mobile Checker is only a few months old and was released with a cautionary "alpha stage" mention about a month after the W3C team also redesigned its Developer Tools website.
This means it's not fully finished yet, and pretty big changes are expected in the upcoming future.
Under the hood, the Mobile Checker is a basic mobile browser emulator built using Node.js and Selenium, combined with some of W3C's famous validators.
The W3C Mobile Checker will help developers check for problems specific to mobile devices
Currently, the W3C app can analyze a page using three different mobile browser and device profiles (2 phones, 1 tablet), render a basic screenshot of what the site looks like on that particular device, and present a report of its findings.
W3C's Mobile Checker will scan a given URL for usage of HTML elements specific to responsive design projects, CSS vendor prefixes, the presence of Flash objects, modal windows, the number of HTTP requests, compression usage, unnecessary URL redirects, HTTP errors, and images that could be optimized for a better mobile experience.
The Mobile Checker is also open source, and developers can fork its source code on GitHub and run their own modified version, or they can contribute to it with bug reports and new feature requests via the project's Issues Tracker.
