Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment [LWN.net]

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:46 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263)
In reply to: Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment by mpr22
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Agreed. Some sites even has a "feature" where they detect that you have a mobile phone, and sends you off to the mutilated version. Even worse, a lot of them has no way to get back (short of changing user agent).

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Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 13, 2012 20:21 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Much, *much* worse: many sites (FireDog was very bad about this) detect that you're on a mobile device *and redirect you to the mobile *HOMEPAGE** (no matter what actual internal page you were trying to go to.

The proper approach to this is:

1) detect the user's browser. If known non-mobile, stop.
2) If known mobile, display the page using a mobile style sheet, if possible.
3) On your mobile stylesheet, provide a link to allow the user to switch back to the non-mobile style, and a second link to set a cookie to make the non-mobile behaviour the default for that site.

You shouldn't do it with redirects, cause perhaps the user wants to share that story with friends, and those *friends* won't be on a mobile device -- some mobile sites work poorly or not at all on desktop browsers.

(While I'm at it: hint: putting the title in the URL is also wildly antisocial design. If you must do so, do it as a (deletable) suffix to the articleID.)