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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?"
I have to disagree. I use Plone as a development framework for both "normal" web sites and WAP sites. The user agents are really useful to determine which mobile device is performing the request. This in turn enables me to, say, scale images to an optimal width server side. It saves a lot of bandwidth and makes full use of a larger screen.
I clean the ua's and apply a Jaro Winkler similarity algorithm. This approach results in a 90% successful match, and in the cases where the match is incorrect it return a sibling phone.
As far as the mobile world is concerned UA's are great.
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.