Leading mobile operators, content distributors and equipment manufacturers have joined together to work on creating standards for developing web-based mobile apps. The Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group will form part of the W3C web standards association. The group will seek an industry agreement on core features for developing web-based, HTLM 5 mobile apps, as well as conformance test suites to meet the standards. Facebook is one of the founding members and will be contributing its own mobile browser test suite to the group. Called Ringmark and based on software from Bocoup, Facebook's test suite helps developers adapt their apps to work on all mobile browsers. Ringmark is available for use already and will be soon made open source for use in developing the W3C standards. Other founding members of the standards group include Samsung, HTC, Sony Mobile Communications, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, TCL Communication, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, KDDI, Softbank Mobile, Qualcomm, Nvidia, ST-Ericsson, Intel, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, Adobe, Netflix, Vevo, Zynga, @WalmartLabs, Electronic Arts, Sencha and Bocoup. The W3C's Robin Berjon and Facebook engineer Tobie Langel will be leading the new W3C group.
