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?"

Neat! Can I access the cell-page with a computer?

[Opportunist]

Because I'd love to do without the feature (read: crap) heavy pages and go straight to the content.

How does this make sense?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is no one using stylesheets?

Repent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww did mean old Vodafone got an algorithm to reduce all the bloat web developers put on sites because they use Dreamweaver or other code generation tools?

Time for a addon for firefox with a on/off switch for mobile version of the website :D.

On another subject if this is legal then blocking adds from sites is also no?

Re:Isn't the real problem...

[lpontiac]

The whole idea of the web is that any page should display on any user agent. It's the user agent's job to adapt the content to the display, not the server's.

A nice concept that doesn't actually work in the real world today.

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

[fymidos]

most of those heavy pages don't really have any content anyway, why bother ?

Re:Isn't the real problem...

[FyRE666]

The whole idea of the web is that any page should display on any user agent. It's the user agent's job to adapt the content to the display, not the server's.

This just shows you're not a web developer. You might as well say that you should be able to put petrol or diesel into your car and the engine should sort it out. There's very little content that's appropriate for both a 2560x1200 screen and a 120x160 phone display...

Re:Isn't the real problem...

[IBBoard]

Not a web developer? IMO it shows he is a web developer and he's one who thinks about XHTML/CSS. For content that can be displayed on both then how about text? Whether it's widescreen or phone display then text should display fine. Have a page serve up content including:

<h1>Page title</h1>
<div class="menuFloatedRight">
<h2>Menu</h2> ...
</div>
<div class="contentWithBackgroundImage">
<h2 class="headerWithBackgroundImage">Some header</h2>
<p class="intro">Some paragraph of introduction</p>
<p>Main article goes here.</p>
<p>And here...</p>
</div>

then along with some CSS the content can be identical for all user agents and each user agent can decide which styles they want to support and hence adapt it. If you're on a mobile then you might want to ignore the background image and the right-floating of the menu, but keep those attributes on the desktop browser, and so the user agent is adapting the content to the constraints of the display.

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

[bateleur]

Straight to the content would be nice, but be careful what you wish for... There's no way advertisers are going to accept the idea that mobile versions of pages have no ads. With the screen area so small what will happen is that ads will appear on separate screens before the content you're trying to view.

Desktop browser ads are mild by comparison. They sit at the top or the side, easily ignored. The worst they ever manage is to waste a bit of bandwidth. I predict people with more powerful phones will soon be spoofing non-phone user agents in an effort to dodge the evil phone versions of ad-supported pages.

Re:User Agent Stylesheets

[TLLOTS]

A lot of that really depends on the kind of content you're talking about. For example, on a page with numerous large images one might consider inserting place-holder elements onto which a background image is set via css. By taking this approach you're able to avoid inserting the images directly and instead give css considerably more power in presenting your page to different media types.

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 ??

Re:Isn't the real problem...

[Andy Dodd]

CSS? Mobile Phone? What???

CSS is a complex resource-intensive standard that no browser developer has yet to implement correctly.

A proper CSS implementation in a mobile phone with a 160x120 display and a few megs of memory? Yeah right!

There's also the fact that CSS inherently operates by telling the device what to remove once it has received the full page, as opposed to not sending the device the information in the first place. Not everyone lives in a UMTS or EV-DO coverage area, you know... Even if it formats well for display on my device (an above average 240x320 Windows Mobile 5 PDA phone), a "non-mobile-optimized" site often is 100-200 kilobytes, while a mobile-optimized one is 10-20 kilobytes. (Simpler HTML, no images or only very small ones, etc.) CSS won't help here because it fundamentally means "send everything and let the client sort it out".

Even with CSS, the differences between mobile and desktop versions of a site are more than just formatting. Try going to Google with a mobile device - You'll see that the differences in the site are far more than just formatting.

Re:How does this make sense?

[fons]

Because people are creating too complicated websites. There are so many div's used solely for the layout that it's almost impossible to define a simpler layout by just changing the CSS. You have to cut out the redundant div's too.

Also (most of the time) there is too much information on one page. Some information has to be close to other info etc. For a mobile site you really need to rethink the content. So you need change more than just the CSS.

I'm talking about big corporate websites here.

Re:User Agent Stylesheets

[mha]

By doing this you use CSS for content rather than style! What a great "solution" - count me out.

display: none does not save HTML bandwidth

[tepples]

CSS provides Media Descriptors that allow specific stylesheets to be used depending on the presentation media.

'Handheld' is such a descriptor.

Setting large parts of an HTML page to use a CSS class such that @media handheld { .someclass { display: none; } } doesn't keep the HTML from being downloaded, doesn't keep the download from taking time, and doesn't keep the download from counting toward the user's monthly cap.