Re: Charter [via Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group]

On Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> On Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Josh Soref wrote:
> > Marcos wrote:
> > > What feature did I use?
> > > Which working group am I going to complain to?
> > >  
> > > There is no "W3C iPad detection" feature, AFAIK :)
> > >  
> > > The point is that some things are identified best at features and others as
> > > use cases… I needed to detect an iPad because I needed to add touch enabled
> > > scrolling, but only for the iPad (and not for Desktop).
> >  
> >  
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > I have a netbook (Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t Netbook), it can act like a normal laptop, or I can rotate the screen and fold it down. At which point, it's a tablet.
> >  
> > My netbook is full touch screen. And you've just discriminated against it.
>  
> Yes, I made that business decision. I have never had such a device visit the site. When I do, at some level where it makes business sense, then I will consider adding support for it… or when it becomes practical to do so through some "feature". Right now, I don't have a good way to determine if your device is touch enabled (you could be in either mode), apart from doing "is it an iPad" detection I am lacking such a feature…. so even though you could have come to my site in "touch mode", it would suck for you x2 if I gave you the touch experience if you had arrived in Desktop mode (in which case, you would need to do the contortions of unplugging your device from the keyboard, mouse, and computer monitor to use my touch site!… followed by some swearing... so I've probably done you a service, and not discriminated at all:))
>  
> >  
> > You don't need to detect "iPad". I also have devices with touchpads. Please don't assert that you need to detect a specific piece of hardware. You should instead be doing something like this:
> >  
> > If (iPad) then
> > Redirect_to(TouchOriented)
> > Else if (tinyScreen) then
> > Redirect_to(MiniSite)
> > Else
> > Redirect_to(Desktop)
>  
>  
>  
> That may be so, but these are guidelines. I may explicitly want to target the iPad because it provides me with an unmatched experience (or because I want to impress iPad users). Whatever the solution is, it needs to cater for the ability to "discriminate" at will.  
> >  
> > On each of Desktop, MiniSite, and TouchOriented, you should have at the top/bottom buttons the user can click to change between Desktop, MiniSite, and TouchOriented. So if you don't have sniffing for my Ideapad S10-3t, I can still get to the TouchOriented site if I want to.
>  
> Yes, perhaps I "SHOULD"… but the reality is that I sometimes don't want to; or don't have time or budget to do that.  
> >  
> > Technically the "right way" to do detection at this point is with CSS Media Queries fwiw. And there are discussions in www-style about adding some more device characteristics to make it easier to get this right.
>  
> Right, but right now, the solution a lot of people are using this:
>  
> http://modernizr.github.com/Modernizr/touch.html
>  
>  
> Which seems kinda a crappy way to solve the issue (and does not really address the "dual mode" issue, as it assumes a device is only used in one mode).
>  
I'll just add that the site I am talking about is, as it's something I'm working on now that covers both mobile and desktop:   

http://specs.wacapps.net/

I'm happy for people to rip it apart as part of the discussion. I'll throw it into the mix because I consider myself a pretty average Web developer so hopefully the site is representative of what "average web devs" are doing - it's hand made (+some libs like jQuery, Modenizr, etc.). And the budget and time constraints and visitor data (tracked through Google Analytics) I talk about is real - though I won't share any numbers.   

--  
Marcos Caceres

Received on Wednesday, 29 February 2012 16:49:23 UTC