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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.
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?
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.
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.
A nice concept that doesn't actually work in the real world today.
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.
most of those heavy pages don't really have any content anyway, why bother ?
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
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.
This just shows you're not a web developer. You might as well say that you should be able to put petrol or diesel into your car and the engine should sort it out. There's very little content that's appropriate for both a 2560x1200 screen and a 120x160 phone display...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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?
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/
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.
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.
Please, just offer a different site. It's annoying as hell when you then can't browse to the version of the site you want to because of someone else's whim.
Otherwise you're just restricting access to a site someone's specifically navigated to. Offering a second site provides all the benefits you mention of image scaling, etc. without this downside. I'm sick of having to change user agent strings just to view websites.
Most of the time, thanks to a combination of the User Agent Switcher and boredom, I'm usually seen from the other end to be browsing on a Commodore 64, a GE washing machine, or a potato with wires stuck into it.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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!
CSS? Mobile Phone? What???
CSS is a complex resource-intensive standard that no browser developer has yet to implement correctly.
A proper CSS implementation in a mobile phone with a 160x120 display and a few megs of memory? Yeah right!
There's also the fact that CSS inherently operates by telling the device what to remove once it has received the full page, as opposed to not sending the device the information in the first place. Not everyone lives in a UMTS or EV-DO coverage area, you know... Even if it formats well for display on my device (an above average 240x320 Windows Mobile 5 PDA phone), a "non-mobile-optimized" site often is 100-200 kilobytes, while a mobile-optimized one is 10-20 kilobytes. (Simpler HTML, no images or only very small ones, etc.) CSS won't help here because it fundamentally means "send everything and let the client sort it out".
Even with CSS, the differences between mobile and desktop versions of a site are more than just formatting. Try going to Google with a mobile device - You'll see that the differences in the site are far more than just formatting.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Because stylesheets don't stop data from being sent to the device in the first place.
It's not just about display, it's about connectivity.
Even relatively "clean" pages like Slashdot's main non-mobile site are too bloated to be easily usable over a GPRS connection.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Because people are creating too complicated websites. There are so many div's used solely for the layout that it's almost impossible to define a simpler layout by just changing the CSS. You have to cut out the redundant div's too.
Also (most of the time) there is too much information on one page. Some information has to be close to other info etc. For a mobile site you really need to rethink the content. So you need change more than just the CSS.
I'm talking about big corporate websites here.
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.
"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."
This sounds good at first blush, but it really isn't an ideal solution. I live in Japan and I have one of the latest au cell phones. It gets TV, I can use the camera to take pictures of Japanese characters and look them up in the included English/Japanese dictionary. And I can browse both normal "PC" (as the phone refers to it) websites and mobile sites.
I always, always, always use the mobile sites. Since I get charged by the packet, the mobile sites are much better because they are built to be low bandwidth (not to mention they're usually focused on the cellphone - the Final Fantasy site, for example, lets you purchase cell phone games and ring tones). I'd get killed (literally death by packets) if I browsed real web sites on the phone as the data transfer would KILL me (well sort of - the maximum I can get charged for more data is around $40).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
'Handheld' is such a descriptor. Setting large parts of an HTML page to use a CSS class such that @media handheld {