Mandating respect of some heuristics?

Hello dear CT TF,

I'm wondering if the CT guidelines shouldn't mandate some of the (for
now qualified as) "heuristics" as meaning that a CT proxy shouldn't
apply any non-trivial transformation (with an explicit list of these;
e.g. only compressing/removing extraneous white space would be allowed).

The heuristics I have in mind in particular:
 * mobile doctypes (XHTML MP and Basic, WML)
 * <link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href=""/>
 * (possibly Content-Type: application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml)
 * (possibly a mobileOK claim if that gets defined in time for this
document)

The reasons for mandating these ones in particular would be that they
express quite explicitly the intent that the author made his site for
mobile devices (while e.g. a uri pattern cannot be said to have
associated semantics per the Web architecture).

I think the high-level question behind this practical proposal is
whether a mobile CT proxy should be allowed to transform content that
was developed with mobile in mind or not. 

I tend to think that given the mission of our WG (which I understand is
to encourage the development of mobile-friendly content), I think we
should make sure that someone that invested in making his site
mobile friendly won't get his work transformed by a CT.

(I think some CT vendors argue that some mobile-designed web sites are
still not as optimized as they could be, but my take would be that this
is up to the users/the market to decide, not to the operators/CT)

I know some of these questions have already been heavily discussed by
the group and the task force, but I think the approach of favoring
mobile-content creators by default would be a better one for the mobile
web ecosystem as a whole.

Let me know what you think,

Dom

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 14:10:42 UTC