Qantas iPhone Mobile Web Site

Qantas have created a subset of its web site for mobile phone users called " Qantas WAP ". This provides Timetable , Arrivals , Departures , Contacts and an email address for Feedback . According to ITWire ( iPhone popularity with tailored website , Stephen Withers 19 August 2008) the pages have been tailored to suit the iPhone 3G (and you can see the iPhone version using developer features in Apple desktop Safari browser), with versions for BlackBerry and other smartphone to follow.

However, I found it works fine in the Firefox and Opera desktop browsers. Qantas provide a simplified web page to suit mobile devices, even to a desktop browser. This can be useful as web pages designed for mobile devices tend to be faster to load and easier to read.

The pages are coded in XHTML Mobile 1.0 , a cut down version of HTML (associated with WAP 2). The mobile version seems to be being provided by Telstra, with references to Telstra's mobile portal appearing occasionally. It looks like the developers have taken the sensible path of creating a general purpose mobile web interface , rather than one heavily customised for different smartphones.

The code includes access keys, so pressing "3" on a phone will select the third option on the menu for "departures". But the menu is in the form of a table, not a numbered list, so the user would be unlikely to know they could press 3. This looks like a very early and tentative attempt at a mobile interface, of the sort a second year university student might do on their first attempt.

The page failed both W3C Validation (66 errors) and W3C Mobile OK tests (5 errors). Timetable Arrivals Departures Contacts Feedback Home Code for the page: < html xmlns = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > < head > < meta http-equiv = "Content-Type" content = "text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" / > < title >Qantas WAP < body link = "#990000" alink = "#990000" vlink = "#990000" text = "#000000" > < table width = "100%" border = "0" cellspacing = "0" cellpadding = "3" bgcolor = "#FFFFFF" > < tr > < td bgcolor = "#990000" >< img src = "/img/wap/logo_qantas.gif" width = "109" height = "32" > < br > < table border = "0" width = "100%" cellpadding = "0" cellspacing = "0" > < tr > < td >< img src = "/img/wap/icon_tail.gif" border = "0" hspace = "3" > < a href = "/flightinfo/do/dyn/SchedWAP?imode=true" accesskey = "1" >< font size = "3" >Timetable < tr > < td >< img src = "/img/wap/icon_tail.gif" border = "0" hspace = "3" > < a href = "/flightinfo/dyn/wap/search_arrivals" accesskey = "2" >< font size = "3" >Arrivals < tr > < td >< img src = "/img/wap/icon_tail.gif" border = "0" hspace = "3" > < a href = "/flightinfo/dyn/wap/search_departures" accesskey = "3" >< font size = "3" >Departures < tr > < td >< img src = "/img/wap/icon_tail.gif" border = "0" hspace = "3" > < a href = "/flightinfo/dyn/wap/contacts" accesskey = "4" >< font size = "3" >Contacts < tr > < td >< img src = "/img/wap/icon_tail.gif" border = "0" hspace = "3" > < a href = "mailto:websupport@qantas.com.au" accesskey = "5" > < font size = "3" >Feedback < br > < table width = "100%" border = "0" cellspacing = "0" cellpadding = "0" > < tr > < td bgcolor = "#990000" >& nbsp; < img src = "/img/wap/icon_backarrows.gif" border = "0" width = "15" height = "19" >& nbsp; < a href = "http://wap.telstra.com/wap/" >< font color = "#FFFFFF" >Home < img src = "http://mtc.qantas.com.au/b/ss/qantascom/5/G.7--WAP?pageName=WAP - Qantas WAP - Home" alt = "" / > The page failed a W3C mobileOK Checker [Beta], but this might be due to limitations in the test, not the page: W3C mobileOK Checker [Beta] Make your Web site mobile-friendly! NB : Note that this service is very experimental: it is based on a beta-released library , and based on a non-yet stabilized version of W3C mobileOK Basic . Please get involved to help improve this service! Evaluating http://qantas.com/mobile with mobileOK Basic gives the following results: This page is not mobileOK Basic! Summary Tests failed: 5 / 25 Tests passed: 20 / 25 Warnings: 3 The page failed W3C Validation : with 66 errors.

These appear to be real errors due to the use of incorrect markup in the page: Markup Validation Service Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of Web documents Jump To: Validation Output Errors found while checking this document as XHTML Mobile Profile 1.0! Result: 66 Errors Address : Encoding : iso-8859-1 (detect automatically) utf-8 (Unicode, worldwide) utf-16 (Unicode, worldwide) iso-8859-1 (Western Europe) iso-8859-2 (Central Europe) iso-8859-3 (Southern Europe) iso-8859-4 (North European) iso-8859-5 (Cyrillic) iso-8859-6-i (Arabic) iso-8859-7 (Greek) iso-8859-8 (Hebrew, visual) iso-8859-8-i (Hebrew, logical) iso-8859-9 (Turkish) iso-8859-10 (Latin 6) iso-8859-11 (Latin/Thai) iso-8859-13 (Latin 7, Baltic Rim) iso-8859-14 (Latin 8, Celtic) iso-8859-15 (Latin 9) iso-8859-16 (Latin 10) us-ascii (basic English) euc-jp (Japanese, Unix) shift_jis (Japanese, Win/Mac) iso-2022-jp (Japanese, email) euc-kr (Korean) gb2312 (Chinese, simplified) gb18030 (Chinese, simplified) big5 (Chinese, traditional) Big5-HKSCS (Chinese, Hong Kong) tis-620 (Thai) koi8-r (Russian) koi8-u (Ukrainian) iso-ir-111 (Cyrillic KOI-8) macintosh (MacRoman) windows-1250 (Central Europe) windows-1251 (Cyrillic) windows-1252 (Western Europe) windows-1253 (Greek) windows-1254 (Turkish) windows-1255 (Hebrew) windows-1256 (Arabic) windows-1257 (Baltic Rim) Doctype : XHTML Mobile Profile 1.0 (detect automatically) XHTML 1.0 Strict XHTML 1.0 Transitional XHTML 1.0 Frameset HTML 4.01 Strict HTML 4.01 Transitional HTML 4.01 Frameset HTML 3.2 HTML 2.0 ISO/IEC 15445:2000 ("ISO HTML") XHTML 1.1 XHTML + RDFa XHTML Basic 1.0 XHTML Basic 1.1 XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2 XHTML-Print 1.0 XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1 MathML 2.0 SVG 1.0 SVG 1.1 SVG 1.1 Tiny SVG 1.1 Basic SMIL 1.0 SMIL 2.0 Root Element: html Root Namespace: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml Options Show Source Show Outline List Messages Sequentially Group Error Messages by Type Validate error pages Verbose Output Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy Help on the options is available. ↑ Top Validation Output: 66 Errors Line 8, Column 11 : there is no attribute "link" .

"#990000" alink="#990000" vlink="#990000" text="#000000"> .... Thu Aug 2008 08:08 (3 months, 1 week ago)