Ringmark Launch

This morning, at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor announced Ringmark, the mobile web test suite that we’ve been working on with Facebook. At Bocoup, our mission is to further the evolution of the Open Web. That’s why we’ve gotten behind Ringmark with our JavaScript expertise. Ringmark comprehensively tests the open web features that empower developers to provide top-tier mobile experiences, and synthesizes the results into a clear and compelling format. We believe this suite will help developers make decisions about building for the mobile Open Web, encourage device manufacturers to ship the Open Web as a first class citizen on phones, and help device manufacturers make decisions about what features to implement in mobile web browsers.

Ringmark is the product of the continued research, testing, design and infrastructural effort. We believe that Ringmark is the most thorough open web test suite, and the first mobile web test suite of its kind.

Boaz has a joint guest post with Matt Kelly today on the Facebook HTML5 developer blog which you should take a look at to read more about our methodology in building Ringmark.

I would like to reiterate Boaz’s sentiment, and express our incredible gratitude to the Open Web test pioneers from Modernizr, caniuse and Are We Playing Yet.

We worked very closely with Facebook on the implementation of Ringmark, as well as with Ocupop who developed the Ringmark identity, and helped us form the ring visualization, so we’d also like to take a moment to thank them for all their hard work and their excellent vision in crafting and refining Ringmark with us.

In the near future, we’ll be working with Facebook to open source Ringmark, get it on GitHub and donate the tests to the W3C. We believe that this will open a productive avenue for developers to take concrete steps to get involved in pushing the web forward. In turn, we’ll also be contributing back to the projects that helped catalyze our progress here.

We’re looking forward to inviting you to engage in this research and testing endeavour, so join the Ringmark Facebook group and follow Ringmark on Twitter to stay in the loop. In the meantime, please run Ringmark on as many devices as you can, share your feedback, and stay tuned as we’ll be blogging about some of the gotchas and surprising failures we encountered during the development process!

Until we get Ringmark on GitHub, we would like to invite you to pore over the results data, which we’re storing in Browserscope. The Browserscope test key is agt1YS1wcm9maWxlcnINCxIEVGVzdBiwoq8ODA. You can get get direct access to the JSON and CSV for the Ringmark results, as well as view the results table online here.

Please join us in #bocoup on freenode if you have any ideas for visualizing this data, or if you just want to talk about Ringmark.