Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

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.

>>> 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.

I apologise if I've misinterpreted you. You said

> 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)

I'm pointing out some recent experience demonstrating this exact  
situation - with legacy devices existing in the wild, outside  
territories where they may have been long-dormant. I think I wrongly  
interpreted your "someone somewhere" as exasperation.

>> 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.

Absolutely - but I think you and I have a clear understanding of where  
we differ in how to avoid the transcoding issue.

>> 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.

Thanks :)

> 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.

Tom

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Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 17:40:53 UTC