The “This is Mobile” Flag
I’m starting to see more and more folks use the handheld media type link to indicate when a mobile optimized version of their content is available. Excellent! However, as normally described it’s meant to point to the mobile version of a page from the desktop version. What do you do if you have only mobile pages? If your pages are WML or XHTML-MP it’s somewhat easy for a proxy to figure out you have content meant for mobiles, but that behavior really isn’t standardized. How do you indicate to the world that your site is meant for mobile?
If what you’re looking to do is inform indexes and content adaption services that you already optimized your page for handheld use you can use the same header right in your mobile content. You have to spoof a mobile user agent to see it from your desktop, but MoFuse is doing that with the site it generated. Check out the mobile version of Read/WriteWeb for example, it has a handheld media type link pointing to itself at m.readwriteweb.com. When an intermediary server like Mowser sees that header we just direct the handset along to the location in that link, even if the link points to the current page. The same thing also seems to work for the intermediate servers like Google. If you’re generating only meant for mobile I suggest putting that header in so that users end up directly at your website instead of getting adapted pages.
February 4th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Does that work for transcoding solutions less developer-friendly than Mowser? (you know who I’m talking about)
And can you give a specific code example for those of us only somewhat technical?
February 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Hey Barbara,
Many of the content adaption engines respect the flag now. I don’t think Novarra does, but they seem to be running rough shod all over the web. I believe the other major ones use it.
There are some examples in the AdMob post, and we have a few examples and example code on the Mowser publisher wiki:
http://pub.mowser.com/wiki/Main/HeadersOverview