L
Luca Passani
Hallo, I am Luca Passani and I'm the architect of the WURFL
and WALL projects:
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/java/wall/index.html
we have a problem with the behavior of SmartPhones. All the phones
seem to have the same user-agent (only the display size varies):
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220)
to add to that, the accept header is not very descriptive at all.
The problem with this is that developers won't be able to tell programmatically
the capability of each device. Please note that HTML-support is not the only
aspect of a device that developer want to detect. They also
want to detect which formats are supported, which version of java,
wap push, MMS and whatever the future brings.
Now, one may speculate that this is a Microsoft strategy (which as usual
assumes they are going to take the world by storm), but I don't
believe this to be the case, because such a poor implementation
decision would harm developers and eventually bite Microsoft back
in the backside, so this must have fallen through. It can't be a concious
decision by MS.
Could you make sure that device manufacturer add, as a very minimum,
their own bit at the user agent?
something like this would be ok:
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220) MOT-MX-200
If someone from Microsoft would like to discuss this, feel free to contact me
either through email (or phone, but I won't post it here).
regards
Luca Passani
and WALL projects:
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/java/wall/index.html
we have a problem with the behavior of SmartPhones. All the phones
seem to have the same user-agent (only the display size varies):
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220)
to add to that, the accept header is not very descriptive at all.
The problem with this is that developers won't be able to tell programmatically
the capability of each device. Please note that HTML-support is not the only
aspect of a device that developer want to detect. They also
want to detect which formats are supported, which version of java,
wap push, MMS and whatever the future brings.
Now, one may speculate that this is a Microsoft strategy (which as usual
assumes they are going to take the world by storm), but I don't
believe this to be the case, because such a poor implementation
decision would harm developers and eventually bite Microsoft back
in the backside, so this must have fallen through. It can't be a concious
decision by MS.
Could you make sure that device manufacturer add, as a very minimum,
their own bit at the user agent?
something like this would be ok:
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220) MOT-MX-200
If someone from Microsoft would like to discuss this, feel free to contact me
either through email (or phone, but I won't post it here).
regards
Luca Passani