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Vodafone Move Invites Web Development Chaos
hoagiecat writes "Web developers want mobile phone users to be able to access their sites, but mobile browsers generally choke on heavyweight HTML put together for traditional Web browsers. A host of services have sprung up that allow two sites — one for mobile users, one for PC users — to coexist at the same URL, with the browser's user agent string distinguishing between the two. Vodafone has come at the problem from the other end, offering a new service that translates traditional Web pages into mobile-friendly ones on the fly — but it strips out the user agent in the process, breaking sites designed around the other strategy. And Web developers are mad. Will similar moves by other carriers disrupt this nascent Web development ecosystem?"
Because I'd love to do without the feature (read: crap) heavy pages and go straight to the content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
yep. spoof the ua string.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
that web developers broke the web by making the page served up dependent on the user agent? The whole idea of the web is that any page should display on any user agent. It's the user agent's job to adapt the content to the display, not the server's.
Relying on a user_agent string is inherently stupid, and that doesn't change just because the device purportedly sending it is a mobile device.
As a Vodafone "business" customer for the last 15 months, Vodafone is doing exactly what the article claims:
... It's unclear if Vodafone removed the user agent capability for "diabolical" reasons, such as to maintain firm control over the content that users can access, or if it was a legitimate mistake, Harper said.
Companies that are on Vodafone's "white list," which is a group of Vodafone-approved services, were notified of the change and the operator is passing the user agent correctly for those services, developers say.
The issue at Vodafone is they need a revenue engine that cannot be hampered so they artificially create one. With the recent court rulings over VoIP services like Truphone, Vodafone is seeing disruptive technologies come into play. This is just business doing the right thing for itself but not for the customer.
For what it is worth, within the group of people I work with (about 2000 people), many of us are using Truphone over the wireless broadband we are provided. Suddenly, my 400-600 pound mobile bills are now down to 50/month with loads of unused minutes rolling over. The story is similar with many other people here and across other networks. Are you surprised?
1. Check IP address. It might all be filtered through the same server(s), so it would be a matter of updating your browser-detect scripts.
2. If there's no user-agent, output the simplest page possible. "But then clients with no user-agent get a simple page," you say. So? If they know enough to strip their user-agent, they might appreciate a simpler site anyway, and they should be able to understand the issue, at least.
Anyway, why would developers be annoyed? If a browser breaks your site, and you're following standards, the blame is on the browser, not on the developer. If it's just impossible to workaround this, it's not your concern. This thing doesn't have market share like IE, so I don't see the big deal.
Web developers are going to have to get used to it. They've had years of being able to lazily code, develop and test for a single platform and ignore everyone else.
Now iPhone, along with Nokia's E and N series phones, firefox and the growing popularity of OSX, Linux and other alternatives are finally forcing Web developers to do what they should have been doing all along, coding and testing for actual w3c standards instead of Microsoft's ad-hoc proprietary "standards". (Yes I am aware that w3c standards need to be tightened a bit)
Why is no one using stylesheets?
Awww did mean old Vodafone got an algorithm to reduce all the bloat web developers put on sites because they use Dreamweaver or other code generation tools?
:D.
Time for a addon for firefox with a on/off switch for mobile version of the website
On another subject if this is legal then blocking adds from sites is also no?
> Web developers are going to have to get used to it.
They have already gotten used to it. Checking sites on IE vs. a proper browser.
What I don't understand is how a tool controlled by vodafone which renders a page in a potentially non standard and undisclosed way would be the way to get used to. Maybe I misunderstood you?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
- you waste ~100 bytes every single time you request something over http, times ~50 objects on a typical page
- it is a privacy risk; IP+User-Agent is sometimes said to be about as effective means of identifying you as cookies, and it works even if cookies are disabled
- it is a security risk, as it gives out your exact browser version
- is useless for telling the server what to serve, as unless you use one of 2-3 mainstream browsers (IE masquerading as Mozilla, Opera masquerading as IE masquerading as Mozilla...) the server won't glean any useful data anyway. Sure, on desktops, browsers other than the usual three are rare, even stuff like Konqueror or Safari counts as "exotic", but the article talks about cell phones...
So just do what many of us do and set your User-Agent to a profane string. Without "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible, MSIE" at the beginning.The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The problem is that even if you code to W3C standard (which I do) using XHTML and CSS or whatever then you can still have a heavy page that is standards compliant but takes an age to load due to what you cram into it. At the simplest level then you could have a standards compliant site that uses Flash for part of it. With the (admittedly poor) idea of "serve depending on user agent" then you can serve simple content to the phone and have it work but a purely standards compliant site wouldn't help there.
Yes, the standards should fix most of the issue in that it should degrade well to a phone display etc, but it won't solve everything.
It also hides the original Accept header, and presents a different list of MIME types. To make the problem even worse, it then refuses to pass across files that the phone would be perfectly capable of accepting. For an in-house site I work on, it broke our ability to deliver compiled WMLScript (application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc) to phones that are perfectly capable of executing the scripts.
All properly designed pages look fine on mobile browsers. I'm mad that fellow developers don't understand fluid, degradable layouts and accessibility. That's the medium we work in and has always been best practice.
That said, surely the inclusion of a UA string in the translation service and reciprocal HTTP header would allow those few developers who have taken the time to produce a site for mobile devices to have their site display as intended?
Clearly, the proper solution to this 'problem' is for mobile devices to have a proper web browser, rather than some half-arsed cut-down POS.
Now Apple has shown you how to do it, mobile phone industry, I imagine you'll have no difficulty rolling out poor-quality copies in a year or two.
The iPhone Safari rendering engine is even Free as in Something You Guys Don't Understand.
Hmm... I wonder how this fits in with Vodafone's charging.
By breaking the functionality that allows operators to display the mobile optimised pages, they are forcing people to download more content. Even if they only charge for the amount transmitted to the mobile after they've processed it, that's still likely to be significantly more data than people would have had with the optimised pages. And if they charge for the size of the original page (and I wouldn't put it past them), they really are ripping people off.
Either way, I would not be happy with this change if I was on a limited data tarrif.
Copyright limits people's right to copy and modify content. If someone modifies content in face of the owner's expressed wishes, it would seem that they are violating copyright.
The case that makes me think copyright might work involves a sculpture. There was a sculpture of a flock of Canada Geese in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. Some marketing flack thought it would be a good idea to tie red scarves around their necks. The artist sued to have the scarves removed and won. Tying the scarves on the geese was a violation of his copyright. It seems to me that might work for web sites too.
most of those heavy pages don't really have any content anyway, why bother ?
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
The problem as I see it is not really sending back different *web* content, but sending back different *executable* content designed for the phone.
Mobile phone sites use UserAgent to determine what wallpaper or ringtones the device that they're sending supports and send something back that is in the right format / the right size.
It's like when I go to "getfirefox.com" the site knows that I'm on a mac and offers me the Mac version first.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Don't I know it. I use a BlackBerry to surf the web most mornings on the train, and I see these all the time. I've learned to avoid some links specifically because I don't want to waste my time trying to navigate a crappy mobile version of a site. For example, I no longer click on any Reuters or USA Today news links on Slashdot or Digg, because rather serve me the article I asked for, these sites entirely ignore the URL I sent it and drop me on their mobile page, from which (I guess) I'm expected to navigate to the thing I originally wanted. Unfortunately the mobile page contains links to news categories and a list of the most popular stories, and it's usually impossible to find the one I wanted. Many news sites use similar services. The big provider seems to be Crisp Wireless, which proudly announces its responsibility for this crapiness at the bottom of each mobile page.
My newest pet peeve is the BBC News site. If I type "news.bbc.co.uk" in my desktop browser I get the BBC News page. But on my BlackBerry the site ignores the URL and "helpfully" redirects me to a page where I can select whether I want their Mobile or Desktop edition. It's nice that I at least get an option, but it adds a page load to the process of simply reading the news. And when I select the Desktop link they send me to the main BBC site, not the News site, so I get to make a third page load when I click on the News link to visit the page I originally requested about a minute ago.
How are these mobile sites supposed to help us again?
Basically, the sites affected have two (or more) versions of their site and choose which one to serve depending on the user agent. So in the case, as this, when the browser or proxy agent does not give a useful user agent, don't try to get the mobile company to help you; they obviously are not interested; fall back to ASKING THE USER HIMSELF: just have a little (or big) check box: "click here for desktop, click here for mobile" page. Then store the preferece in the URL and/or cookies (do mobile browsers support cookies?) Or advertise a mobile page, eg:
http://m.whatever.com/ instead of http://www.whatever.com./
I doubt it will be long before mobiles can take on these "heavy weight" websites, so lets just wait a year, and then everyone will be happy and these workarounds will be meaningless.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
How does Opera Mini handle user-agent? I understand it also does a server-side transformation of a webpage. Do web developers serve a special version of the page to Opera Mini?
IMHO, everybody who has developed sites for their mobile portal and had contact with Vodafone's PartnerML should know that Vodafone has always been weird on the technical side when it comes to WAP and mobile web.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Sounds similar to what Opera does with its Opera Mini browser where when you request a page the browser doesnt request it directly from the net but via a proxy, a server operated by Opera - which gets the page for you, shrinks it and sends it to you. Saves traffic and the page you get is far more pleasing to view on a small screen. I wanted to do something similar with squid on my small server at home - just to have more control about what happens during the adaptation process but havent had the time to read up all the docs on how it could be done.. anyone know of some good recipes that already do something like this?
The site content shouldn't need to change - only the presentation.
All that needs to be done is to serve up a different style sheet depending on the user agent, or a default 'safe' stylesheet, or none at all.
Determining which style sheet to use will necessitate peeking at the user-agent so Vodaphones approach could be problematical. Maybe if they had a meta tag to tell their gizmo not to process the site.
That's why I set up my .mobi site alongside my main one, to present a more appropriate (read: smaller, faster, search box at the bottom) view for mobile browsers. I don't have to guess or translate anything and nore does Vodafone: for this URL I generate .mobi-compliant XHTML straight off.
Other than V managing to content block me from one of my own sites in Australia for a while (even though I have content blocking turned off and there's nothing dodgy about the site) their service seems to work quite well. I don't like stuff being redirected via a 'transparent' proxy, but maybe I could use SSL to prevent that if I really cared I guess.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
can we please have a standard tag on pages that indicates a page is mobile optimised.
(if tag present then this type of service displays the original page such)
If there's one thing I've learned from working in the mobile telephone industry for the past year, it's that mobile service providers and indeed, mobile handset manufacturers, have their heads so far up their asses so as to be completely out of touch with the rest of the world.
They understand their customers fairly well, but they show complete contempt for third party software developers and existing Internet and communications infrastructures. They lobomotise almost every new useful feature in the face of the demand for said features, and the pump steroids into the features which really aren't important (5 megapixel camera on my mobile phone, when the f**king thing won't even let me send the high quality snaps over anything but infrared?! Get out!)
Now, what's this I keep hearing about a Linux phone?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
CSS provides Media Descriptors that allow specific stylesheets to be used depending on the presentation media.
'Handheld' is such a descriptor.
Provided the device supports this and use the correct stylesheet there shouldn't be any need to do anything else.
I'm a web developer and I don't whine about chaos when someone's trying to work on my problems.
It's a simple one liner to set the right flag in your code if either the right URL or user agent is detected.
Given the mess we're used to when doing web dev work, panicking about this is laughable.
Straight to the content would be nice, but be careful what you wish for... There's no way advertisers are going to accept the idea that mobile versions of pages have no ads. With the screen area so small what will happen is that ads will appear on separate screens before the content you're trying to view.
Desktop browser ads are mild by comparison. They sit at the top or the side, easily ignored. The worst they ever manage is to waste a bit of bandwidth. I predict people with more powerful phones will soon be spoofing non-phone user agents in an effort to dodge the evil phone versions of ad-supported pages.
So... this only broke websites where programmers blindly accepted user input and trusted it, right?
Jason Lotito
Well, Flash is to all intents and purposes its own user agent. It can make HTTP requests and it can render HTML. Assuming it renders alike on all platforms, it's a quick-n-dirty (TM) way of getting everything to look "right" cross-platform.
The proper thing to do in this case would be for Vodafone's content-munging proxy to declare its own user-agent ident, so that it's at least obvious at the server end that pages might not be rendered exactly as sent -- and knowing exactly what alterations are being made wouldn't hurt web designers, either.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Why dont people just use media="screen|handheld|print" along with optimised code to a) reduce the amount of code sent in the first place, and b) position it properly based on the client I realise you have to download the same amount of HTML which might not be optimised for slower connections but seriously ... isnt that the entire purpose of the media="" attribute ??
--- Stop the world! I want to get off!
check out elinks or lynx and apparently w3m
http://freshmeat.net/projects/lynx/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/links/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/w3m/
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Crazy moderation there. This is the crux of the issue. If people start using standards -- developers AND phone companies, then the problems they're working around will no longer exist.
As someone who's been on the other side of this issue, I can tell you that Vodaphone is not the one creating the chaos. (Also note, some PC proxies will strip out the user agent.)
I've previously received mobile versions of websites on my desktop, merely because I was using a test version of Opera. Opera 9.0 for desktop hadn't been released yet, really neither had the version for Windows Mobile though that had received more notice. Because my user agent indicated I was using Opera 9.0 on Windows their server decided it really meant Windows Mobile and sent me the mobile version of the site.
Sorry, but having different versions of a site based on user agent is wrong because it is too prone to errors. They should use proper CSS media descriptors, or maybe use javascript to check the size of the screen. At least, unless they actually define a standard for user agent that explicitly indicates the platform type and they are sure most browsers follow that standard.
Sure, we can make some sites for mobile phones, but, come on, mobile-phone formatted pages never caught on. It's like camera phones: there might be a case where you can use them, but unless the camera is comparable to a point-and-shoot, it's pretty useless. So too with the internet. Adapting the internet to a device ain't gonna work, because most cellphones are pretty poor at displaying large amounts of information, their processors are pretty damn slow, input is tedious and access speed often quite painful. Since there's little interest, there's little hope a "Standard" way will come about. So every site mucks around with mobile content, when the best solution is to just serve the page, and let the browser deal with it. If your cellphone sucks as a browser, no amount of optimizing will change that. If a website has for cellphones a "low-bandwidth" variant, chances are most PC users would prefer it too.
Yeah, Flash is a special case of the "large thing to download as web content" but it was the one that worked best for "great big thing that you need to download".
As an alternative, take dowfiles.com (and probably the whole FileFront network). Even if they coded to standards and used HTML without tables and CSS for all styling then they'd still have a 55KB header image and a total of 166KB of images to load. That means just using standards still won't make all sites mobile-compatible.
Don't see how this is news. Google Mobile has been doing this for at least a year. Any links to external sites that originate on my m.google.com homepage are automatically "mobile-i-fied" by Google. You can disable the service in your preferences I believe if you want the full size page.
Personally I love the service since it saves me valuable bandwidth and time.
I do not know if Google respects these special User-Agent strings for mobile-specific site versions - and frankly, as a user, as long as the site works, I don't really give a hoot who is parsing it. "Web Designers" need to get their heads out of their ass and realize that the web is a content delivery mechanism, not a publishing and layout mechanism. You have absolutely no guarantee whatsoever on what your content looks like to the end user. If you don't like that than get a real publishing job.
> Vodafone has come at the problem from the other end, offering a new
> service that translates traditional Web pages into mobile-friendly
> ones on the fly -- but it strips out the user agent in the process,
Sounds like Vodafone has been learning from Micro$oft on how to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
well if the vodafone life proxy connects always switch to the mobile versions of the site. this is simple. and just change the css if possible.
This is a bad idea. While there is an issue about how content is displayed, there is also an issue about how much content there is.
What is needed is a new (proposed) HTTP request header that passes the media types (classes) to the server. Then instead of trying to guess the media type from the user agent string, the server will know for sure. For example a request might have the HTTP header "MediaType: display/mobile;geometry=288x384" and a 2nd header "MediaType: audio/stereo;format=mp3,ogg,flac". The server then knows what kinds of media the device has or has enabled. If I turn the sound off, the sound mediat type won't be sent in requests. When I am at home and request a document print (as opposed to a screen print) it could send "MediaType: print/inkjet;hdpi=1200;vdpi=1200" which would clue in the server to limit the content to just what is appropriate for printing.
Your theory "The site content shouldn't need to change - only the presentation." is technically correct. But the point here is to preserve some bandwidth, too, by doing some presentation filtering (only send the media types in use) and optimization (server knows the display size, so it sends small display media or reformats). It's still the same content ... but the parts of the content not needed are not transmitted. On the server side, one way to implement this is to add some XML tags that identify what parts of the conent apply to what media types.
The whole "separate content and style" idea has long had the flaw that too much (usually all of it) content was sent all the time. My above proposal allows the content volume to be limited for transmission while still preserving the fundamental principle of that separation as it applies to the creation of the content. Web sites (such as Vodafone) are really trying to do some kind of content filtering now. This just makes for a standardized way to manage it (so the unreliable User Agent won't need to be used).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Firstly, if you are differing content based upon the User-Agent header, you are doing it wrong. The User-Agent header was intended for bug workarounds, not feature queries. If you want to know if a browser supports a particular document type, you use the Accept header.
Secondly, another person posted that they block the Accept header. That's a real problem.
Thirdly, proxies that alter content are nothing new. There is an HTTP header that allows authors to mark content that should not be altered by proxies. It is Cache-Control: no-transform. Hardly anybody has heard of it, so I doubt Vodafone respects it, but if they do, then nobody should be complaining. Just use that to stop them messing with it. If they don't support it, then complain and ask them to add support.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Opera Mini works great for me. It has a built-in RSS reader. It renders most sites good on a small screen. Reduces traffic. Works with any mobile operator I tried (though I never used Vodafone). It compresses traffic and downscales graphics server-side. It handles Unicode and multilingual stuff. So far it is the best mobile web option for me. It works virtually anywhere, and it is good enough. I even prefer m.gmail.com-in-Opera.mini instead of gmail.app or Google Mobile.
I tried also new Nokia browser (webkit-based) on the E-series phones. It is really impressive, but requires a descent phone. Also it generates much more traffic as it loads the full-blown version of the page. Also some AJAX pages don't work nice with it (e.g. Picasaweb).
Google Mobile is a nice initiative, but it lacks polish and smoothness of Opera Mini experience. In fact it works only in built-in phone browser, which is crap in most phones (except above mentioned Nokia browser).
There are other services similar to Google Mobile (like http://www.skweezer.net/), but they are of inferior quality to plain Opera Mini.
Is it done on a server before it hits your phone or does the phone change the html?
If it is done on the phone just use the opera browser for your mobile phone instead of the build in browser. http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/
I think it rocks.
And why have a white list. Why not get the sites targeting the mobile market to use meta data much like the meta data used for search engines.
meta name="transformhtmlforbetterviewingsuage" content="nochange"
to me to have a white list is not very good. Imagine if all the mobile suppliers use this technology and all have a white list. bad idea. People develop there sites so they are displayed the way they want it to be. I would be pissed as well if someone changed the way my site looked especially if I made it especially for mobile phones.
"Provided the device supports this" is the key phrase here. They do not. In fact they have all kinds of "strange" bugs that require you to code different pages for different phones. (Standards-compliant webpages will not work on the most common phones on the market.)
Also there are other problems. Dealing with a small screen device, you optimize the images for the target screen. And i mean optimize. You do not only scale them, you crop, resize & convert them. Some devices can do only GIF others only JPG, the next one prefers PNG. There are arbitrary size constraints on the whole page (some devices) or individual objects (other devices) which to add the fun-factor also depend on the gateway. (e.g. Device A with Operator O can download >200KB, Device A with Operator P can not download >195KB, Device B with Operator P can download >200KB).
You will not be able to offer an optimized version without the user-agent.
But the main point here is offering content for mobile phones, e.g. JavaGames. You lose a lot of usability if you cannot determine the device accessing your site.
They should have implemented it in a way that sites which offer the XHTML-MP (Mobile Profile) or WML content-type are simply not touched at all. But i think this is more a question of business politics than technological merit.
Vodafone, as well as all web developers relying on the User Agent string are taking the wrong approach to this. There is a reason we can specify mobile for a style sheet. First, your website shouldn't be heavy on HTML and should be able to degrade nicely. Secondly, you use the mobile style sheet to tell the mobile browser how to render everything. It's dumb to rely on the user agent string for ANYTHING and completely ignore standards designed to help with this.
I presume you mean the ability to specify different stylesheets for different media ,
If so then no , its only for adjusting the layout and will in most cases result in the same stuff being downloaded.
A clever client could try to avoid downloading things that weren't going to be dispayed but most don't ( this is
also a way to pre-cache things).
personally i would do a simple standards compliant page that works on both , its hardly rocket science .
Convincing the marketing people not to fill it with crap is far far harder tho.
[site]
Then I guess we should stop helping mobile users by sending them smaller graphics at smaller file sizes... How silly of us to try and help them surf websites faster.
"With the screen area so small what will happen is that ads will appear on separate screens before the content"
By separeted screens, you meant: into (wichever) cell phone happens to be next to me, right?
sweeet.
Well, EDGE and EV-DO are more than capable of downloading large files quickly but... why is your website heavy in regards to file size in the first place? The layout of your website should NEVER be heavy (even highly complex layouts can be done without going above 100KB even with lots of graphics) so this isn't an issue.
If you're using large images for products (which should be the only items that take up more than 30KB per image), then why would you want it smaller anyway? I would rather the full version especially since if I'm loading it that means I want to look at it.
It seems everyone is missing the big picture. Relying on User Agent strings for ANYTHING is like adding concrete to a bridge that's falling apart. If you don't fix it and fix it the correct way, you're going to have tons of patches and eventually the whole thing is going to just fall. The services that make file sizes smaller are also quick fixes that don't really resolve anything and just allows web developers to become more sloppy.
I've been building web sites for over 10 years now and there is no reason you can't have a really complex and graphical website the size of Slashdot or CNN and have the entire page be under 100-150kb. Compression and file formats have come a long way and knowing when to use which one is key.
It is not copyright infringement because the content has not been nodified.
The CONTENT is just HTML code. Just because your website looks a certain what in your IE browser doesn't mean it looks the same when I view it in Lynx.
Does that mean I am guilty of copyright infringement because the site does not look the same as when you created it? Is it copyright infringement when a deaf person watches a film because they are modifying it by removing the sound?!?!?
Like I said above - site owners need to get their heads out of their ass. HTML has no guarantee over layout, that is not what markup is for. It is to offer up *suggested* layouts. If you want layout guarantee, use PDF or something.
It isn't necessary for a phone to implement a full-featured CSS parser, the display can't handle such rich content anyway. Have you ever hit a CSS-designed web page where for some reason or other it couldn't load the style sheet? The result is a pretty plain text page, which would be easily legible on a phone. Some basic formatting would prettify it a bit.
I've done it with Opera 6, you configure the .ini file to ask for the wap filetypes in preference to the html filetypes. I'm not sure whether Opera 9 is different.
"The issue at Vodafone is they need a revenue engine that cannot be hampered so they artificially create one. With the recent court rulings over VoIP services like Truphone, Vodafone is seeing disruptive technologies come into play. This is just business doing the right thing for itself but not for the customer."
And how is there being no businesses to provide the service that Vodafone does the "right thing for customers"? I realize slashdot's attitude towards making money (except for itself apparently) and businesses in general. But as long as the world is the way it is someone will need to make money so that "the customer" can enjoy a service they wouldn't not otherwise have.
"For what it is worth, within the group of people I work with (about 2000 people), many of us are using Truphone over the wireless broadband we are provided. Suddenly, my 400-600 pound mobile bills are now down to 50/month with loads of unused minutes rolling over. The story is similar with many other people here and across other networks. Are you surprised?"
Am I surprised that they're in business to make money?
Remember Moore's Law? In a couple years cell phones will have enough horsepower to process full/ordinary web pages. So just wait, and the problem will disappear.
Hey look at that, a mini-example of how a tiered internet could work..
The web was designed to deliver browser agnostic pages, that the browser made display decisions about based upon the platform (small screen, large screen, gui, text, etc.), OR based upon the wiewing preferences of the user ... NOT based upon the preferences of the server or page developer.
All of the web elements that have come along that force viewing decisions upon the client (browser restrictions, resizing the screen, etc.) are a blight upon the net.
Cry me an f'n river. "oh no! I'll have to write browser agnostic pages again! Like I should have for the last 12 years. Woe is me." Blow me. It's my screen, not yours. Learn how to write a real web page (meaning one that is browser agnostic), or get a new career.
Having web filters out there that make it hard or impossible for the server to force this crap upon the client is a blessing. I know nothing else about vodaphone, but on this issue: good work, and ignore the whiners.
While I agree with most of your points and know that a good XHTML/CSS website should be able to degrade gracefully on older/less capable platforms, and even while I consider that 100KB is already twice as heavy as a webpage should be at most, you have to consider the platform itself: something that fetches the "mobile" CSS and identifies itself as a mobile playform (user-agent) it means it's not a "computer/standard" device, so we can imply that it has one or two limitations: download speed (and mobile data rate, which aren't unlimited in a lot of cases) and display size/resolution.
It doesn't do anything good to send a 50KB, 400x300 JPEG photo to someone on a mobile device which has, say, a 240x160 display. It means the device must download the image, resize it, display it. So it takes longer to download (time, possibly money), takes processing time and power (time, battery life) to render something in lower resolution (with a possible huge loss of quality depending on the resizing method).
Take Opera for the Nintendo DS as a good example. I'd rather send a custom "version" of the website (custom CSS, custom website width and custom images, all the rest is the same) so people can browse in RSS mode: it loads faster, it displays faster, the graphics are lighter and sharper, it removes the need to scroll horizontally to read the content. I'm helping the user view my website for his platform. If implemented correctly, it's not that difficult to manage. I only have to remember to make a smaller image when I add something, the website does the rest.
apt-get lynx
If history has shown us anything, it's that the vast majority of "web developers" cannot be trusted with checking the User-Agent header. How many times have those of us who use non-mainstream browsers or platforms seen websites choke because some moron is doing this incorrectly?
Example: My bank's website works with Firefox on Windows and Linux and Mac, but not on any other platform Firefox runs on (like BSD or Solaris). Why? They've hard coded a few Firefox user-agents into their scripts. Result? To check my bank statement I have to find the nearest Win/Linux/Mac box.
CSS is a blunt hack that can only reformat the existing data, largely by hiding it. It cannot break it up into smaller pages, select different scripts to run, or negotiate different content altogether unless you have them download all the content for all media types then display only the types you want.
Plus, it's usually handhelds that have the poorest CSS support around.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I know slashdot is 99% morons who don't have a clue what they are talking about, but this is ridiculous. Using CSS means you get LESS html, and it is simple html just for semantics (conveying meaning instead of visual style). CSS is then used to tell the browser how it should be displayed. My average html page size is just under 2KB, and it gets its look entirely from images and a 1KB css file. Basing your assessment of html+css being used correctly by looking at the bloated shit markup of incompetant morons who are using it wrong is not the way to go.
No, standards alone won't help in this case (unless they used CSS properly and indicated that smaller images were available specifically for mobile devices).
The problem with Vodafone's proxy method, is that there's no way for site owners to know in advance that their site is about to be (possibly) munged. At least if it sent a special browser ident, and the details of its munging processes were published, then savvy people could code properly against it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If my site is designed such that something happens and you modify it such that something else happens, we may have an issue. Clearly, copyright affects creative work but we have seen that 'creative' can be quite broadly defined.
Circumstances alter cases and the idea is not nearly as risible as you purport it to be. Consider the following page: http://www.accesscopyright.ca/Default.aspx?id=125 They clearly think they can forbid you from modifying their content. If, by modifying a header file, you cause their content to be modified then they may have an actionable tort.
'Handheld' is such a descriptor. Setting large parts of an HTML page to use a CSS class such that @media handheld {
I work for one of the many companies impacted. Several months ago we noticed the volume of complaints about mobile content downloads not working had risen.
We looked, and they were all Vodafone UK customers. We looked on our server and found all accesses were now by Mozilla Firefox.
Our site has to deliver content specific to each make and model of handset. This is to due to the miryad of capabilities the handsets offer and we want each customer to receive the best version of the product. We use http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ to help with this, armed with an XML overlay maintained in-house reflecting certain "real-world" situations we are aware of. We have gigs of essentially duplicate content to this end.
If you suggest the User-Agent should not be a factor here, you clearly aren't earning money in the mobile applications marketplace. It is essential.
We traced the IP address range being used to a German company and asked them to explain what was happening. A very nice, but exasperated, chap responded that Vodafone had outsourced their mobile internet gateway to them but had failed to supply the whitelist of acknowledged content download sites. We asked what list, and were told we were obviously another company who'd not been told. We submitted a list of domains that we ship content from and basically had to wait for the User-Agent to be switched back on again.
Meanwhile our customers were being politely told on our download sites that their phone wasn't supported. Which isn't particularly helpful to either party.
Several days later the mobile User-Agent became visible and our download sites appeared from the consumer to have been fixed. Not our fault, we changed nothing. Consumer doesn't know that though, they wanted their ringtone.
Unfortunately, now manufacturers and operators have added a new trick to have to deal with. They've begun shipping phones with serial numbers and firmware revisions in the User-Agent string. This means we now have a massive computational problem with best-matching. There appears to be no reason behind it, no justification. It just makes download sites break frustrating the consumer.
Oh, and while I'm in rant mode - those of you who think the online shop selling the ringtones get the full GBP1.50 revenue from that billed text message, think again. We're lucky to see 90p of it, far less from Virgin customers. The mobile operators take a huge chunk of our money. The same is true when you dial a premium rate number (say GBP1.50 per minute) from a mobile phone and see you've been billed GBP2.50 or GBP3.50 or more - it's not us Guv' - it's the operators/networks.
Advertisers (like Google AdSense) cannot dictate what you do when you offer your content in a separate medium, unless you have some sort of a contract with them.
The only one who would be upset about the lack of advertisements on the mobile version is the content publisher. They (content publishers) can integrate ads in a "screens" fashion like you suggested which will probably be bad for business. Or they can do what sites like Slashdot does, i.e. cripple the mobile version so it's only useful for a quick summary/scan, which forces the user to favor and use the web version that has advertisements.
If you can't mod them join them.
"And Web developers are mad"
You're telling me. Oh, wait, you meant the other kind of mad. Nevermind
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Probably for the same reason we don't have an attribute to define which browser the style is for or an attribute to define what screen size, orientation, and color depth th style is for. Most developers are to lazy to use such tools and those that aren't are mostly purists that don't think making multiple versions of content for different uses is acceptable.
Of course it's even worse on phones because most don't properly support the media attribute. They'll either use the screen style or, worse, use both the screen and handheld style. There is no sane behavior that works on every phone. Of course phone browsers should just be a real, fully standards compliant, web browser. There is no excuse anymore for crappy browsers that don't work well.
Handheld is kind of a dumb idea anyway because there are so many different handheld devices. It'd make more sense to be able to define screen sizes, orientation, and color depth for different styles so that the phones can try to figure out which, of several, styles to use. It'd also be nice for websites viewed on computers as it'd let you enable your site to work on ancient cruddy systems without holding back on making them really nice for modern systems. Anyone that has a site that sometimes gets viewed by some freak running IE4 at 640x480, especially if they are in management at your company, knows how painful it is to deal with. Sure most of your viewers may be using IE7 and Firefox with a screen size of 1024x768 or greater but they'll just have to look at an ugly, hard to use, site crammed over into the upper left hand side of their window.
So, it's the fault of developers. Lazy developers of web browsers for phones don't follow standards. Lazy developers of websites don't follow standards. Lazy standards bodies don't properly create standards to handle real world problems.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You can't write browser-agnostic pages for mobile phones. The browsers suck too much. Writing browser agnostic will result in pages using the least common denominator of the mobile phone capabilities, and believe me it's not pretty.
Yes, you can write browser agnostic web pages that work well on (desktop, laptop, text-only, PDA, mobile, multiple browsers instead of only on variations of IE, etc.) just fine. You just can't include useless crap in the page.
The $299 iPod runs full Web 2.0 sites, same as the $399 iPhone. Everyone who is not named Apple is copying that approach right now.
The idea that there is a separate mobile Web is anachronistic in the extreme. Even before the iPhone it was a stretch to think we were going to create a shadow Web for mobiles. Once you use an iPhone you can clearly see that we don't have to.
The whole idea of Web 2.0 development is you don't have to make multiple sites, you can build one site that scales. If you close your eyes to IE you see we are already living in the future. Mobiles are full citizens on the Web now, if you have a full Web browser.
Always on broadband network connection and no Web 2.0 browser? Bullshit. An anachronism.
I hear a lot of people calling out that they need the user agent to scale images, but it's more than that.
Certain phones do not support tables, some do. Some support background colors, some don't. Or some do in certain circumstances. They also can or cannot support left or right alignment of images. Some phones can talk wml, xhtml or some other lingo. Some phones support video, some don't. If they do support video, you definately want to know how large the screen is to make sure you provide the right links, and you want to know what kind of video it supports best: there is a huge difference in optimization there. Phones also support different kinds of ringtones (but that's common knowledge, I hope). Also, phones that claim in their request-headers to have a screen of 320x240, effectively have a screen of 300x220 because the browser itself takes a number of pixels from the border.
To optimize all these things, you need the user agent string. Not just the type of handset, but the exact string because each update of a handset can mean different settings for pixels, ringtones, video, page-layout, etc etc. For instance: an mp3-ringtone that works on a handset of operator A will be switched off by operator B "because they don't want their handsets to support mp3 due to legal regulations", which you can only see through the exact user agent string. If you're lucky...
So taking away the user agent string is one step taken too early. Phones do not support the same things at this moment, and a proxy server cannot "translate" all content for you, if a decision is made in the server what content you'll be served according to the user agent. And what they support depends heavily upon the mobile phone industry _and_ the operators that patch & hand out mobile phones...
Once all handsets support the same features and all have at least 640x480 screens, then Vodafone can do whatever they like. Roughly estimated that'll be when hell freezes over, or perhaps in a few decades.
Vector graphics should scale beautifully to any size. (It might be processor heavy though.) And some simple [java]script to manage a dynamic UI will hopefully not be too processor intensive.
Does anyone use .mobi domains?