Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

Tom Hume wrote:
>
>
> On 7 Jan 2009, at 15:27, 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?
>
> Course you can :) I don't see any assertion to the contrary in the 
> comment from Sean that you quoted.

Sean's comment reveals that Novarra feels entitled to reformat mobile 
content to make it better (for their definition of better). I disagree 
with that notion. What's your problem?

>
>> 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.
>
>
> This is not universally true though - you and I discussed this back in 
> March last year on my blog posting at
>
>     http://www.tomhume.org/2008/03/guidelines-for.html
>
> Where Russ Beattie popped up to point out that whilst this MIME type 
> is a decent heuristic (and it's noted as such in CT), it's not absolute. 

OK, so, since your ask for it, I will repeat all the arguments here (and 
by the way, Russ wrote that comment when he was still trying to make 
Mowser fly, so he was heavily biased at the time).

The XHTML Mime type can be used  for web content only theoretically. In 
practice nobody uses that MIME type for full-web content simply because 
it would break way too easily on all browsers (save-as dialog for MSIE 
users, catastrophic error messages and no content at all for Firefox, 
Opera and Mozilla). Nobody uses XHTML for full web content, not even 
those who think they are using XHTML (somewhere they'll be doing 
something which will make all browsers reverse to quicks mode and 
consider their xhtmllish mark-up as nothing more than tag-soup).
Because of this, application/xml+xhtml is an excellent heuristics to 
detect mobile content (the only place where the MIME type is adopted).
Now, I can understand that W3C would find the idea of accepting that 
MIME type as an indicator of mobile content embarassing (it could be 
read as the admission that XHTML did not go very far on the web). On the 
other hand, this is not my problem and it is simply not OK to discard 
application/xml+xhtml  as a good heuristics for CTG because the 
following holds in virtually all cases:

     application/xml+xhtml  => mobile content

Luca

Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 18:00:36 UTC