Whilst sober, I can begin to type up my thoughts on yesterday’s Mobile Monday event at Centre point, largely about content adaption. I had a good time. 
I feel quite strongly against content adaption/transcoding. And no you can’t argue that Opera adapts content. Think of Opera’s approach as a single “distributed browser”. Tight coupling with the browser is great. See my thesis. Openwave/Novarra don’t work with browser vendors like Webkit or Gecko.
I was expecting a debate, though the event seem to be run in such a way that didn’t foster debate. The relevant presentations from Openwave and Novarra were buffered and it was a long time before we reached the “panel discussion”. By that stage I had a few glasses of South African red and the panel was far too biased or rather boring for my liking.
So I fealt like I had to say something for the angry Web developers I’ve seen on the momo list. Unfortunately this frustration could only be posed as a question. Many of the points or myths that Openwave/Novarra pitched could have done with quick interactive responses. How do you ask a question, when they’ve got this, this and that and that wrong wrong wrong.
I know for a fact that WiderWeb/Openwave get laughably low traffic, despite their claims of “opening the Web”! Novarra says they have 160k users of 70 million Vodafone users. What’s that? 0.2%??!
Afterwards I engaged fellow Web developers for support and found little(!). Some people were whitelisted now, so they don’t care. Some people just want flash. Most people want to make money yesterday on the mobile. Others want Apple to open their proprietary mobile platform. Some people were silly enough to get a stupid dotMobi domain to get around the problem or prefix their site with wap. Yes yes… what about the Web? You know, the real one? With HTML?
The heated issue was that:
- Web developers were writing “Web content” for particular UA strings. (That’s bad)
- Man-in-the-middle Novarra rewrites UA strings to a standard Mozilla one
- Web site returns “full site content”
- Novarra screws up the content
- User gets that unacceptable “user experience” (funny)
So people were up in arms, because their mobile specific “Web site” with WURFL typically was breaking. So surprisingly I was chuckling to myself, “those guys get what they deserve for making device dependent Web pages!”
Ok, bickering aside. The solution I asked of Novarra and Openwave last night was simply to be accountable.
That means publically giving out proxy details of their content adaption software so Web developers in-the-know can publically evaluate what they actually do. Randy from Novarra said he’ll get back to me. Novarra are launching something soon with Yahoo! Ed from Openwave said he’ll share it with me as long as Novarra do it and that I don’t publically criticize the service. Hmmmm…. 
Yes, I still don’t really know what they do inside their “walled garden”, so I can’t get too mad. If they stripped CSS and images and tidied HTML, then it’s probably actually OK. Unfortunately I don’t think they are smart enough to do just that. 
We are on the brink of something new with the mobile device. The (mobile) ipod webkit browser is the same browser on my MacOSX Macbook Pro. I am tired of “screen size” and “mobile browsers will always be years behind” myths. Lets push for up to date browsers with excellent standards compliance.
Lets stop blaming Web developers and lets stop coming up with new non-HTML markups. Lets discourage hacks like “content adaptors” from hindering the exciting deployment of capable Web browsers such as Webkit on mobile devices.
Kai,
I was the Openwave speaker at MoMo and afterwards the two of us did have an interesting debate on the issues you raise. You wanted content owners to adopt standardised HTML for markup and the phone industry to push towards smarter browsers as found in the iPhone I recall.
My point back for consideration was that most people don’t see the web experience to be a key deciding factor in buying a handset – go check a Carphone Warehouse brochure to check relevance. Because of this we may spend many years with browsers not much better than those available today so must look to make the experience as good as possible for these handsets, which in my terms means adaptation. Reading your thesis I note one conclusion:
“However adaptive proxies do have the potential to extend the functionality of an UA by outsourcing expensive operations.”
This is what our OpenWeb platform does; most current phone browsers do not run JavaScript so we do for example. If we do find a site that is in HTML with CSS we’ll do as you ask and just tidy it up.
Happy to continue the debate next time we meet!
“Content owners” already use HTML. No one writes valid XHTML or XML. WML isn’t the Web and no one wants a new markup language. The Web is HTML and most people do write bad (non-standard) HTML. I want better browsers to cope with this reality.
Regarding phone purchases, I’ve been hearing the opposite. Consumers are looking out for Opera and other capable “better browsers”.
That quote is what I said earlier in my blog entry. An adaptive proxy coupled to the UA is ok. They are working closely together. Expensive operations like resizing an image is done by a proxy as a function of the browser. The adaption proxy is an actual component of Opera Mini, together they make a single browser.
However Openwave/Novarra AFAIK do not work or extend the browser such as Webkit/Gecko. They are disjoint, decoupled and blind. So you will have poor results. It’s another type of walled garden, without the potential benefits of ensuring quality and control, e.g. iMode.
How about giving public access to your adaptive proxy Ed? Please?
I just tried my humble homepage in widerweb’s proxy.
Results are here:
http://static.natalian.org/2007–10-11/widerweb/
Examine the code here: http://static.natalian.org/2007–10-11/widerweb/h-indented.html
It’s pretty ugly and buggy.
The adapted version (3K) is about twice the size as the original (1.6K). One good thing is that the content seems all there thankfully.
As the chair/MC for the evening, I can only agree that the discussion was too short,
unfortunately. If there was sufficient support I’d be happy to consider an event
that featured mainly panel debate.
Fwiw, afaik the debate is not about whether modern phones have modern capable browsers.
It’s about there being a lot of devices that are technically not up to snuff, and it
is also about the small screen size and lack of pointing device and the user interests
typically but not always being different to when a desktop site is accessed.
Your point seems to be that content authors should ignore the contextual challenges of
mobile and create desktop centric sites willy-nilly. I don’t agree with that.
Transcoding doesn’t address the contextual challenges of mobile – i.e. that users
may be interested in different things while mobile. It may address some of the issues
about broken markup causing misoperation of devices and of the raw Web experience
being off-putting to mobile users who haven’t got “advanced” devices yet.
I would like to make adaptation “safe” – in that it doesn’t screw up carefully prepared
representations, I’d like users to have the choice of viewing the desktop presentation
if they feel their browser is capable of working properly for them. I would like content
providers to be able to understand what it is doing – which requires documentation from
those who deploy it as to a) when it is going to be inserted and b) what it is going to
do. Above all I’d like the user to have a choice and for them to receive a usable
service.
As I say I’d be more than happy to organise a follow up session if there was support
and if it stood a chance of being a “reasoned exchange of views” that takes the discussion
forward.
Jo
I don’t want to try encourage content authors to do anything. I think that is established fact, trying to get people to adhere to best practices is not going to work. I am encouraging the industry to embrace a new quality of browser, like Apple has done. That is Mobile 2.0!
Adaption as we already know is quite broken, to say the least. I think you are once again fighting a losing battle, by trying to get content adaptors to simply do the right thing. They do not have the right mindset.
I welcome debate. A balanced discussion. MM was largely about sales pitches and very one sided argumentation. Hence I was very frustrated. It would also be good if the debate was organised and I dare say short and to the point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate
Jamie Kitson just pointed out Google’s content adaption service:
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhendry.iki.fi
`tidy -i -wrap100 -o tidy.xhtml google.xhtml` was run to examine their changes:
http://static.natalian.org/2007–11-06/