Hi everyone,
Recently, I've been thinking a bit about the components we've been
creating for Engage's mobile features, and how they relate to Infusion
as a product.
As you know, we've been extending the Fluid Skinning System to include
new themes that provide natural-looking visuals for mobile devices.
Our iPhone FSS theme is shaping up quite nicely, and themes for other
devices will follow. We've also been creating reusable, generalized
components to support navigation, tagging, and other common
interactions on a mobile device.
On the other hand, Infusion has a clear identity as a product at this
point. It provides a collection of tools for creating great JavaScript
user interfaces on the Web that are more usable and accessible.
Infusion is solid and production-ready, and works across a broad range
of browsers. It's also server-agnostic, unobtrusive, and highly
interoperable.
Given this criteria, I think it makes sense to include the mobile
components and tools such as the mobile FSS themes in Infusion,
assuming they're broadly useful to many of our users beyond the museum
world. Obviously, any components coming from our work on Engage will
need to be sufficiently mature and generalized before being included
in Infusion.
Chatting about this with Michelle, she raised some concern about
including code in Infusion that isn't tested or useful across the full
range of A-grade desktop browsers. She suggested the idea of a
separate, mobile-specific product or "module" for Infusion that would
be separately packaged and distributed. Given our move towards a
usable custom Infusion builder for 1.2, where users can pick and
choose components "a la carte," this issue might be somewhat moot. But
browser support is an important issue to think about.
Interestingly, the Q4 2009 version of the Yahoo! A-grade matrix will
also include mobile browsers, so this is clearly an issue other portal
and toolkit authors are thinking about, too. If we do start to
introduce mobile-only components into Infusion, I'd suggest we should
clearly label them as such in the release--just like we do with our
Sneak Peak, Preview, and Release-grade components. We'll also want to
extend our browser support pages to clearly articulate which mobile
devices we test with. Over the long term, we'll endeavour to ensure
that many of our components have broad support--and unique interaction
styles--across both desktop and mobile browsers.
I'd love to hear others' thoughts about this issue. Do mobile-specific
tools, such as the mobile FSS themes and the Screen Navigator
component, belong in the Infusion product when they are sufficiently
mature?
Example of Screen Navigator and mFSS iPhone theme in action (use with
Safari):
http://build.fluidproject.org:8095/incubator/engage/integration_demo/html/index.html
Colin
---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org
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