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?"

Comments

Re:User-Agent = breakage

[hedleyroos]

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.

Re:Neat! Can I access the cell-page with a compute

[elementik]

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 ??