RE: test against Gmail

I agree completely with what Rotan writes. Why would anyone consider mobile
devices the same as non-mobile web client if not because of politics? what
does practice have to do with all this? practice is to  default to web (and
it couldn't be differently, in a world where web hits outnumber mobile hits
by 3 orders of magnitude or more).

This brings the whole discussion straight back to the original BP sin: one
web 

Luca

PS: for those who may not have seen this yet:
http://www.passani.it/gap/intro.htm



-----Original Message-----
From: public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Rotan Hanrahan
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:01 AM
To: public-bpwg@w3.org
Subject: RE: test against Gmail


It's a tough call for a site administrator. You may have an excellent
adapting Web site, capable of delivering excellent presentations to a
wide variety of devices, especially the diverse Web-enabled mobile
devices. However, you may also know (perhaps from the nature of the
content/service you provide) that the majority of users will not be
using mobile devices and therefore you choose to default to non-mobile
content whenever you receive a request from an unknown device.

This is legitimate, but despite your ability to provide excellent
content for known mobile devices (perhaps in all cases adhering to the
underlying aims of mobileOK) your default action falls foul of the
mobileOK necessity to provide mobile content to unknown devices.

There may come a time when the media people start a tvOK initiative for
Web-enabled TV. And we may even see a gameOK initiative for Web-enabled
game consoles. The adapting solutions will happily support all of these
and more.

But when it comes to the default response, all these initiates will be
in conflict. It will not be possible to be xyzOK in default
circumstances.

I know that the adaptation technologies my company provides, and those
of our partners, associates and (of course) competitors, can deliver
mobileOK *if* the operator of the service chooses to default in that
way, but experience shows that most providers of "one-URL" strategies
still prefer to default to old fashioned PC browser content. That may
change as usage patterns shift.

Perhaps one day there will be no need for the default behaviour, because
the request protocols will demand some form of disambiguity (perhaps
even to the point of tidying up the Accept header once and for all) but
I suspect my hair will be quite grey by then...

Meanwhile, should we be considering a defaultOK initiative? :)

---Rotan.



____________________________ 
Dr Rotan Hanrahan 
Chief Innovations Architect 
Mobileaware Ltd 


-----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 10:10:45 UTC