RE: Best Practices document - not best practices

I agree that using "mobile" is not appropriate. Even if I find it to be the
most acceptable and user understandable for now in a two url strategy.


Kevin > your mail about this basic WML news site without images that isn't
suited for your smartphone, confirm two things :

- As Andrea Trasatti and I pointed before, one might purposely want to
display the desktop version of a site on its phone and vice versa. 
However, I think this is not a very common issue (a mobile-geek or
developper issue ?).

- Device adaptation is a lot more than having a unique degraded version of a
website. Offering the best possible rendering depending on the handset
capacity is very important.
However, automatic adapation sometime isn't enough when it comes to
information design.

For example, my main current project is to build a mobile version and a
smartphone/PDA version for an international brand. The mobile version can
still be accessed from a PDA, with a nice xhtml/css rendering. But the PDA
version has more static content, a smarter navigation system and heavier
graphical charter.
But this 3 versions strategy raise much more questions than the URL problem,
as the fronteer between poor and smart mobile and between mobile and PDA
cannot be defined easily.

Cheers, 
Nicolas Combelles
Apocope



-----Message d'origine-----
De : public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] De la
part de Rotan Hanrahan
Envoyé : lundi 8 août 2005 15:00
À : public-bpwg@w3.org
Objet : RE: Best Practices document - not best practices


http://news.bbc.co.uk/detailed/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/summary/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/bite-sized/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/headlines/

These seem better to me than http://news.bbc.co.uk/mobile/

The URLs should describe the resource, not the mechanism/device that is used
to access the resource. Strictly speaking, in purist terms, the URL should
be opaque and not reveal anything, but we have evolved in our perception of
the way the Web works and we now have a reasonable expectation that the URL
reflects the resource it references.

I would prefer to be able to enter any of the URLs in my list into my device
(mobile or otherwise) and get something that is appropriate to my device and
yet also reflects the expectation I had when I selected those particular
URLs.

When we see .../mobile/ in a URL we may be inferring something about the
nature of the resource because of our current understanding of what "mobile
" means. But mobile is diverse, and becoming more diverse over time, so the
meaning of mobile is fluid. It would be wrong to infer something about the
nature of the resource based on some loose notion about the devices that
access it.

So I don't approve of device-specific information appearing in the path,
though I know that for technical reasons some sites choose to do so.

---Rotan.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrea Crevola [mailto:andrea.crevola@3juice.com]
Sent: 08 August 2005 13:27
To: public-bpwg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Best Practices document - not best practices



Hi,

the use of two different urls gives to the user the choiche for choose the
version that is much closer to his needs.

I think that this kind of selection has a positive effect on user experience
(sorry if you have already discussed about this idea, but I've started
reading the list only during last days...) and I think also that has to be
mainteined someway.

This involves adaptation: we can detect distribution context [1], but how
many and which degrees of freedom we have to preserve for our user? 
And at what level (website, page, element, style)? What are your opinions?

Best regards,
Andrea
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-di-dco-20050118/

Holley Kevin (Centre) wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I am not entirely in agreement with this.  Just looking at these sites:
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/mobile/
> 
> I much prefer the original non-mobile site even on my mobile because the
photographs are missing from the "mobile" site.  Many site designers seem to
equate "mobile" to "text only" and rich media is really a trade off between
screen estate, time to load and content.  I am not clear that "one size fits
all users" will really work for this.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kevin
>  

--
e-mail: andrea.crevola[at]3juice.com
msn: andrea.crevola[at]hotmail.com
"Ogni minuto è un'occasione per rivoluzionare tutto completamente."

Received on Monday, 8 August 2005 13:53:51 UTC