Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

Happy new year everyone!

Picking up on two bits of this:

On 6 Jan 2009, at 23:48, Luca Passani wrote:

> >  sean: Sometimes there's content for high-end phones tagged as
> >  "mobile" that may not work on a low-end phone. We already have a
> >  method for keeping proxies away from content, "no-transform"

[snip]

Which bit of Seans comment do you disagree with here Luca?

> In short, Novarra is getting ready to reformat perfectly OK mobile  
> content, just because someone somewhere may have a legacy device  
> (and which definition of legacy is up to them to decide). How much  
> more evidence do you need that this is not the way to go? let  
> Novarra do whatever they want, but please prevent them from doing it  
> in W3C's name.

Some actual data might help here. We launched a J2ME service last year  
globally, Trutap, and were surprised to see major takeup in Asian  
markets - particularly Indonesia and India. In these markets, the top  
handset for accessing the service was an original Nokia 6600 - a  
device which is all but obsolete here in Europe, and which we'd  
usually consider not worth a port for a European service.

This was a surprise for us, but supports the assertion that older and  
less capable handsets may be well-used in some markets.

So... is "mobile" a binary state (when applied to content)? Or are  
there various forms of mobile content? I'd say the latter (XHTML-MP,  
cHTML, WML, AJAX-supporting, etc.).

That said... I'd agree with you (as did most of the group yesterday on  
the call, as you will have seen from reading the minutes) that the  
fact that content has been made-for-mobile indicates that the  
developer has thought about context of use, and that it should  
therefore be left alone by default.

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Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 09:26:15 UTC