Re: ACTION-961: usefulness of multipart-mixed

For the record, while Novarra at vodaUK has a problem with HTTP 301 
redirects, they do not seem to cause extra damage in the case of 
multipart (to be clear, novarra is not fixing the problem with multipart 
on Nokia devices in any way, as this splinter new Nokia N96 is showing. 
Simply, novarra-vision is not introducing more problems, as I had 
previously suspected):



Luca

Luca Passani wrote:
>
> John, I just happened to have a N95 8Gb in my drawer, so I hit your 
> site with it. The XHTML was there, but none of the pictures were loaded.
>
>
>
> This checks out with what I was experiencing with multipart/mixed on 
> Nokia devices back in 2003-2004 with Nokia 3650 and 6600, which, in 
> turn, made me conclude that accept header and UAProf were a totally 
> unreliable source of information to decide which devices can manage 
> multipart.
> I am sure that Ericsson does it well because they do actual testing 
> with devices.
>
> Luca
>
> John Hardi wrote:
>> Tom,
>>
>> We developed it in-house and I don't have an open source code example 
>> I can point you to.  If you want to see it in operation, the 
>> "dogfood" site for our platform m.mcore.com has multipart enabled. 
>>  If you go there with a multipart-capable device, you should get a 
>> multipart payload.
>>
>> If you have curl, this should get you today's home page in multipart:
>> curl -H "Accept: 
>> text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml,multipart/mixed" -A 
>> "Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95_8GB-3/20.2.005 
>> Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, 
>> like Gecko) Safari/413" http://m.mcore.com/motricity/ptl/px/home/i.aspx
>>
>> An unscientific snapshot from one set of web servers showed a bit 
>> over half the mobile pages being delivered in multipart.
>>
>> As I mentioned in my original post, the degree of difficulty for 
>> multipart may  make it unsuitable as a "best practice" 
>> recommendation.  It's use is probably most suitable for sites where 
>> performance is critical and worth the investment.  But I did want to 
>> address the misconceptions that multipart being archaic or only being 
>> used in network components.  It is a viable technique which addresses 
>> some of the considerations of sections 3.4.5 and 3.5.2 of the best 
>> practices.
>>
>> John

Received on Thursday, 28 May 2009 22:16:25 UTC