Device Adaptation Makes Sites Less Transparent
I’ve been waiting for a while to see the FIFA stuff, which was rumoured to be very mobile-friendly. So when Christian posted about the FIFA site being up I headed over there and poked around for a while. Great site! And I think the cup is going to be big in the US this year. I’ve heard a lot more people talking about it and seen much more advertising than I have in previous years.
When I put the fifa.com URL into the native browser on my 6680 I got a very nice looking mobile layout. So of course I started digging to see what they were doing on the site itself. Bringing up source on the FIFA.com site yeilded no hints though. No mobile stylesheet, so I assumed it must be keyed off the user agent (a-la WURFL or something similar). I changed the user agent returned by firefox to “Nokia6680/1.0 (2.04.15) SymbianOS/8.0 Series60/2.6 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1″, same as that returned by my phone. Here are some simple instructions for changing the user agent in Firefox for anyone who wants to fool around some. That did it, I got the layout I expected when I pulled up the page with the agent sent as if I were a Nokia phone.
This is something I really see as an ongoing problem in mobile web development. A lot of the knowledge about how to make something work on the mobile web is now walled off in server logic instead of laid bare for everyone to see and share. For most applications there’s application logic that lives on the server side and ends up somewhat walled off (although that doesn’t have to be, Ning is working to reverse even that). But the presentation side was always something that lived fundamentally in a “visible source” environment. That’s part of what made it work, and I think part of the reason it continues to progess the way it does. Unfortunately the mobile side doesn’t seem to be benefitting from the intrinsic transparency. Making a good mobile website currently really demands a technique like this be used. The more this stuff stays closed off the more I think we’re going to see fragmentation and competition within the segment. Is there a good way to make a functional mobile site and at the same time put all that presentation logic out for all to see?
May 27th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
transparency is a relative thing… from the end-user’s perspective, device transformation is a good thing (and pretty transparent) - the web site is properly formated based on user-agent (and/or any other attribute).
device adaptation, and related server-side “magic” is not problem in my opinion…
one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) we get to have consistent behavior (from CSS to JS to XSLT) across mobile browsers, then transformation will be able to happen totally on the client side, and *that* source will be able to be viewed and shared.
ceo
May 28th, 2006 at 12:57 am
I agree that it’s not a problem for the user directly, but I do think that it causes undesired side-effects in terms of the overall community of potential producers of content for mobile devices. I agree with the end goal of mobile devices participating in the CSS/JS/XSLT way, but I wonder if there’s a way to make the currently hidden parts of device transformation more visible?
Kind of like what WURFL did for device capability. Instead of everyone embedding their own checks for what devices can do, coded up according to their own understanding of how to test for those features, there’s a common layer that embeds all that know how in a reusable config file and set of components.
Think about the question from the point of view of a person who has some information they would like to make available to folks on mobile devices - but who isn’t a mobile professional and doesn’t really want to be one. What can be done to aid that person in putting together their application in a way that it works on as many devices as possible without requiring them to learn the ins and outs of how different devices work and what needs to be done to handle them?
- Mike
June 8th, 2006 at 6:06 am
Hi Mike
you have touched my pain point here . i agree to you on the point that it will be good for the mobile dev community if we shift the action to Device Side and avoid using the Server Side Logic . but i am not sure if that is a good idea for End user . as a mobile we b developr i would like to do what you have suggested but not at the cost of End User .
with the rampant fragmentation in mobile device market its unlikely that we will reach a common platform soon and AppLayer based devlpoment which is oblivious to device undernith is a far cry .
crux of the problem is that Mobile OEM are unwilling to learn from History PC Market and lesson in “benifits of Standarization ” it offers . on a second thought they might know the advantage of a uniform standards but No body wants to end up being the next IBM in this process .