Comments on: Mobile Sitemap http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2007/02/17/mobile-sitemap/ Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:29:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Sean Owen http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2007/02/17/mobile-sitemap/#comment-82004 Sean Owen Sun, 18 Feb 2007 07:49:46 +0000 http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/?p=287#comment-82004 I agree that getting the mobile web to show itself to a crawl is not necessarily easy. I'll point out that we (Google) send an Accept header which asks for mobile Internet media types too. While that's the right way to do it, it doesn't work everywhere. We also have to use yet another UA to get some cHTML content; many sites look for something like a "DoCoMo" UA. (PS for the mobile webmasters, if you're going to write rules based on UA, do make sure you send your mobile content when you see "Googlebot-Mobile"!) Even sites that are trying to look at Accept headers properly have trouble since text/html is the official type for both desktop-oriented HTML markup and cHTML. I think this highlights how confused the whole MIME / Internet media type system has always been -- some document types have multiple media types (XHTML anyone?), some media types map to multiple document types (e.g. text/html for HTML, cHTML) -- but, that's another story. I agree that getting the mobile web to show itself to a crawl is not necessarily easy. I’ll point out that we (Google) send an Accept header which asks for mobile Internet media types too. While that’s the right way to do it, it doesn’t work everywhere. We also have to use yet another UA to get some cHTML content; many sites look for something like a “DoCoMo” UA.

(PS for the mobile webmasters, if you’re going to write rules based on UA, do make sure you send your mobile content when you see “Googlebot-Mobile”!)

Even sites that are trying to look at Accept headers properly have trouble since text/html is the official type for both desktop-oriented HTML markup and cHTML.

I think this highlights how confused the whole MIME / Internet media type system has always been — some document types have multiple media types (XHTML anyone?), some media types map to multiple document types (e.g. text/html for HTML, cHTML) — but, that’s another story.

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