Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

Tom Hume wrote:
>
> 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?

I disagree with the idea that who runs the network feels entitled to 
know better than those who created the application and owns the 
copyright. Can I?

>
>> 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.

This is not what I was talking about, or, at the very least, your point 
is only very remotely connected to what I was saying. Asian users have 
all the rights to complain that a given service isn't working properly 
on their devices. In addition, it is in the interest of the content 
owner to support those users with "lighter" versions of the application. 
What is NOT ok, is for someone else to use this scenario as an excuse to 
interfere with an existing application. Developing for mobile is hard 
enough because of device fragmentation. Legalizing attempts to "fix" the 
application outside of the programmers control are a sure-fire way to 
totally cripple a development platform which already has enough problems 
of its own.


>
> 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.).

yes. And it's hard enough for developers to support those without also 
having to deal with transcoders.

>
> 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.
I realised that this was the case. In fact, my comment was only about 
what Novarra said, and not about what others said. Do you think this was 
because of the Xmas feelings still lingering?  :)

to be totally honest I also wanted to comment about Bryan expectation 
that W3C should legitimate those nasty looking navigation bars that 
operators want to place on top of perfectly OK mobile content. I'll keep 
this for another time and just express my appreciation of Jo's rebuttal 
of ATT's attempt.

While I'm here, it still does not make sense that the XHTML MIME type is 
not accepted as an indication that a site is mobile. This is the 
situation with 99%+ of the content out there (application/xml+xhtml == 
MOBILE), so there you have a perfectly simple and effective way to 
detect mobile.

Luca

Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 15:27:58 UTC