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 4, 2012 14:49 UTC (Wed) by leemgs (guest, #24528)
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Dear Jonathan Corbet,
Thank you for your posting of good articles about Linux and
Open-source for a long time. I hope that you will support
web pages (e.g: http://m.lwn.net) for smart phone users
additionally. Starting this year, I think that many subscribers
will read your valuable articles of lwn.net gradually.
Thanks again.

Regards,
Geunsik Lim,
Samsung Electronics.

to post comments

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

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:50 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (13 responses)

Hi Geunsik, what phone do you use? Mobile Safari and Chrome reflow the articles so they perfectly wrap to the screen width. LWN's pages are fast and light. I don't see m.lwn.net being able to improve on the exerpience much! I read lwn all the time on an older Android handset.

Commenting isn't pretty of course... The 2-mile-wide text entry box triggers quite a few scroll bugs, and scrubbing back and forth to try to read what you wrote is reminiscent of 40 column terminal days. It would be nice to see that improved.

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

Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:48 UTC (Wed) by dambacher (subscriber, #1710) [Link] (1 responses)

yes this works if you customize lwn to wrap words at less than 40 letters...

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

Posted Jan 4, 2012 22:01 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

though you cannot set it below 20!! What's with that?

Why even have a minimum?

If m.lwn.net simply got rid of the minimum and placed the left column above the main body rather than beside it, it would better for small-screen browsers (not all of which run on Android or iOS).

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

Posted Jan 4, 2012 22:52 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]

Yep. We don't need m.lwn.net, only a couple of extra media queries will do it!

I read LWN from Opera Mobile all the time. Works very well. Only need the media query to default to a sensible zoom level, and move the sidebar to the bottom.

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

Posted Jan 5, 2012 2:00 UTC (Thu) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (9 responses)

I am using Android based smart phone(e.g: galaxy S, galaxy S2) currently.
Although LWN's pages are fast/light technically using multi-touchscreen of phone,
I think that the subscribers need suitable pages
for better readability because of a small screen size of smart phone
compared to a screen size of desktop pc.

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

Posted Jan 5, 2012 2:17 UTC (Thu) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (8 responses)

For example, http://m.lwn.net will get a lot of readers/subscribers
in mobile environments according to smart phone(e.g:iphone,
android phone) users. :)

We already are learning from Facebook/Google+.

*LWN
http://m.lwn.net/ - * not support :(
http://www.lwn.net/

*Facebook
http://m.facebook.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

*Google Plus
https://plus.google.com
http://www.google.com/mobile/+/

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

Posted Jan 5, 2012 5:35 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

having to go to a different URL to get something suitable for your device is a bug, not a feature.

If LWN added some detection to detect mobile browsers, and then converted the left bar to something else, it would be far better than almost any other site when accessed on a mobile device, no need for a completely separate USL (and the implied separate site served by it)

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

Posted Jan 5, 2012 8:54 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course it's not a bug. We type www in front of every domain name to tell the browser we want the Web page and not an FTP site, right?

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic.)

Also... m.lwn.net doesn't exist so far as I can tell. I'm getting DNS failures on both my desktop (Comcast) and phone (Sprint). LWN has always been a pain in the ass to read and use on a phone in my experience, especially when it comes to commenting (iOS devices tend to get especially very confused and lose the scrollbars in the comment fields). If there's a better way to use it, it's clearly not made obvious (or better yet, automatic).

On the upside, at least it's not as bad as the horrendous (if occasionally informative) Phoronix is. That site is a nightmare to use on a desktop with its "oops I moused over a hover-link on the way to trying to click a regular link, and now I have a page-size Flash ad" setup, and it's basically unusable on a phone.

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

Posted Jan 13, 2012 20:17 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

"www" is what you name the web-server host if you haven't got anything *better* to name it.

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

Posted Jan 18, 2012 1:42 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

No such problems with phoronix, here, but then again, I couldn't legally install the proprietary flash if I wanted to (and generally don't bother with the freedomware gnash/lightspark alternatives), as I can't agree to the rights and black-box-liability waivers and thus in the US at least, probably would be held not to have the legal right to install and use them, even if I did want to use blackbox proprietaryware I can't examine from folks already demonstrated not to respect the user's rights, even to examine the code he's expected to agree to waive liability claims on! The noscript and requestpolicy extensions help tremendously as well, and I have privoxy installed with a phoronix-specific blocker for that page obscuring blocker ad that lacks a working close method if scripting is disabled.

But I suspect the biggest phoronix audience is gamers and others that have no ethical or legal problems with proprietaryware, and the flash ads you mention probably work for many of them. Meanwhile, it's quite unlikely I'd be in the market for anything advertised anyway (especially on a site using abusive tactics such as page-blocker ads with no way to kill them if scripting is off), so even if it's per-view paid, it's ultimately better that the advertisers don't get that view from me since that only brings down the response rate and therefore ultimately the per-view fees they're willing to pay.

And life is /so/ much better without the incessant ads... the reason I gave up on TV and radio years ago, for computers and the net, where I could better control such things. (One thing I've noticed, tho, I can listen to internet radio in German or French or Italian or Japanese or Korean or... or even local AZ over-the-air Spanish stations, and have a higher ad tolerance, since I don't understand them and thus they aren't such an insult to my intelligence after I hear them the 10th or 100th time. It takes to the 100th or 1000th time if I can't understand what they're saying anyway, before the invariant recorded repetition itself gets to me.)

Duncan

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

Posted Jan 5, 2012 16:42 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

On my Android phone, I tend to regard "m.wherever" as meaning "mutilated.wherever", not "mobile.wherever"; I've yet to see an m.wherever that was actually better on my 'droid than the www.whatever is.

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

Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:46 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

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).

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

Posted Jan 13, 2012 20:21 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #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.)

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

Posted Jan 12, 2012 16:00 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

And I tend to prefer mobile versions of websites, even when on large screens. This may stem from my use of tiled window managers, but they're generally lighter, less cluttered and less likely to force a specific UI down your throat, as on mobiles even designers seem to realize how their predefined layouts can break on unusually sized viewports. Also, Flash is rarely installed on phones (even though Java MDP is widely implemented), so sites make videos more accessible instead of wrapping them in binary downloaders and players for /branding/.

I want to choose layouts and font sizes myself. Fixed-width text boxes and forced sidebars are ridiculous. Opera can be told to ignore CSS position suggestions and keep web pages narrower than the window, but that does little good against table layouts (which can't be disambiguated from tabular data).