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 5, 2012 16:42 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment by leemgs
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

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.

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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).