Requesting page with 'mobile' user-agent

I noticed that the mobile checker gives a 0% for ebay.com, yet there is 
a page m.ebay.com which is eBay's simplest mobile version and gets a 
score of 57%, and then when I view eBay on my smart phone I get 
redirected to hp.mobileweb.ebay.com/home.
But if I am typing in ebay.com into the mobile checker, which received 
0% and appears to be the full desktop version, the mobile checker should 
be GETing the page with a user agent that contains 'mobile' to trigger 
the different content delivered and/or redirects.
I acknowledge that this particular example could be just how eBay is 
handling the user agent string or mobile checking, but I am asking if 
the page is retrieved in the way I described with only 'mobile' in the 
user agent.  And if not, I am recommending that that is how it should be 
done.
This recommendation is based on what I have read from the W3C's own 
Device Description Repository working group for using testing against 
only 'mobile' in the user agent as the most common thread between all 
mobile device user agent strings.  And secondly, the reason I think you 
should be able to simply type one address that can deliver a desktop 
version and check the same address on the checker for the mobile 
version, is that it goes along with the principles of "one web".
So does it in fact work this way?
I would appreciate any comments and hope I incite further discussion.
  - Justin F.

Received on Monday, 4 February 2013 20:28:00 UTC