RE: test against Gmail

Hi Jo, 

The phrase 'if the nature of the user agent cannot reliably be determined' is the problem. It turns out that there are lots of user agents out there with odd signatures. They might be robots, or custom versions of mainstream browsers, or other things, but they all expect desktop content. 

Hence, application developers experienced in the art of supporting mobile and non-mobile devices default to sending desktop content if the UA can't be identified. That's excellent practice for mainstream multi-channel applications, like GMail, but is not good practice in terms of MWI BP or for sites that concentrate more on supporting mobile devices than on supporting crawlers or customised browsers. It's really a decision for the site owners on which they would rather do. 

Cheers
Rhys  

-----Original Message-----
From: public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jo Rabin
Sent: 04 December 2006 09:15
To: public-bpwg@w3.org
Subject: RE: test against Gmail



> So you could argue that it is inappropriate to test Gmail using the 
> checker since it does so much more than just mobile support. The 
> checker tells you if you are mobileONLY.
>

>From mobileOK Basic: "mobileOK says nothing about what may be delivered 
>to
non-mobile devices from that URI; however, note that a mobileOK URI must return mobileOK content by default if the nature of the user agent cannot reliably be determined".

So I don't think the above is correct. I think the checker checks that in certain circumstances a site provides a mobileOK experience. I don't see that its results are valid only if a site provides _only_ a mobile experience.

Jo

Received on Monday, 4 December 2006 10:03:35 UTC