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.
It's not done on the phone it's done in the proxy the users are forced to use to access the web from their phones. A different browser will get the same.
1. Wrong - the user agent tells you the phone model, which tells you the screen size and capabilities way beyond what the Accept header can tell you. 2. True, but they just replace it with */* 3. They respect it. In fact all you need to do is serve content-type:application/xhtml+xml to leave your site unaltered. Not that you know which XHTML to generate, because the damn user-agent is gone!
However, if your supercomputer goes down... well, your screwed
Cray supercomputers have built-in redundancies. All the subsystems are separate from the processors and memory, which are actually "clustered" (depends on model). Even the OS has build-in means to survive the harshest hardware catastrophe by checkpointing the running jobs regularly, to off-site disks.
1000 machines are more reliable then 1 big machine
Wrong again. With 1000 lousy cheap machines, you need an on-site team of technitians to keep the all up. Supercomputers (with built-in redundancy etc.) have equal or less maintenance requirements.
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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.
It's not done on the phone it's done in the proxy the users are forced to use to access the web from their phones. A different browser will get the same.
1. Wrong - the user agent tells you the phone model, which tells you the screen size and capabilities way beyond what the Accept header can tell you.
2. True, but they just replace it with */*
3. They respect it. In fact all you need to do is serve content-type:application/xhtml+xml to leave your site unaltered. Not that you know which XHTML to generate, because the damn user-agent is gone!
Have you ever worked with supercomputers?
However, if your supercomputer goes down... well, your screwed
Cray supercomputers have built-in redundancies. All the subsystems are separate from the processors and memory, which are actually "clustered" (depends on model). Even the OS has build-in means to survive the harshest hardware catastrophe by checkpointing the running jobs regularly, to off-site disks.
1000 machines are more reliable then 1 big machine
Wrong again. With 1000 lousy cheap machines, you need an on-site team of technitians to keep the all up. Supercomputers (with built-in redundancy etc.) have equal or less maintenance requirements.