RE: ACTION-994: Some evidence of CSS MQ in the wild

I'd like to say in the few hours I've been on this list, WOW.   I have
about a week of mobile web development, but have 20 years of software
engineering experience with 15 or so languages.

I've only started out by trying to detect mobile devices so that our
company can hand off videos via streaming or any other means.  This will
be based on connection speed, screen size, OS, valid formats, etc.   I'm
using an old domain I've had for many years just as a test bed and need
some help where it comes to standards.  Hints why I'm here.  I'm finding
with the few devices I have access too, quite a few inconsistencies and
their lack ofs.  

Before I get into examples, I know all this is company related issues.
I'm not asking for someone here to resolve them.  I'm only asking if
there are standard that should resolve this and if so, how?  If there
isn't a W3C standard for it, can we get one put into place.

Examples:
Opera (Mobile Only)
- On Windows Mobile (3 different HTC Touch phones tested), the headers
say it's MSIE 6, not Opera
- Doesn't allow shared variables within client scripting.  So setting up
speed tests become an issue here.
- However, I found that only Opera, both mobile and Desktop, uses the
HTTP_TE in their header, where other browsers don't seem to be.  Which
is a bad assumption, but it's the only thing currently consistent.

iPhone
- Doesn't allow me to use JavaScript to grab the screen size
(screen.width & screen.height).  I know we can't change the size and
it's currently static, but the new iPhone is coming out with a new
resolution, so how can one tell?
	
Cashing Proxies & 3rd Party Companies
- They seem to mask the browser information for HTTP_USER_AGENT
replacing it with their own info.  Now I've lost all accessibility to
the mobile device.  Some like Skyfire or Bluecoat add their own headers,
but that means someone has to maintain a list of all 3rd party companies
and their headers that should be looked for?  What a mess.

I've gone down the road of evaluating 3rd party companies that say they
already do this and I've found they seem to be doing what I can build in
a few weeks.  I'm old school, why buy when I can build.  Also I found
the 3rd party companies I've looked at doesn't work to hard to figure
out what type of mobile device, they go based off a very generic
standard, which means the problems I mentioned above are returned as
Unknown.

So back to this list.  I hope to learn a lot and sorry up front for all
the stupid questions I may as in the new few weeks.  If you would like
to see what I've done so far, you can access my domain at
http://mobile.dp.bz.  I need as much global information from different
providers and devices as I can to help build a consistent process.

-----Original Message-----
From: public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Appelquist, Daniel, VF-Group
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 6:32 AM
To: David Storey; public-bpwg@w3.org; Francois Daoust; Eduardo Casais
Subject: Re: ACTION-994: Some evidence of CSS MQ in the wild

Thanks all for chiming in on this topic. I think we need to try to draw
this topic to a close so we can possibly come to a resolution on what to
put into the document tomorrow.

David -- You mentioned one use case (choosing which image to fetch) as
an example of their use. Would you be able to write or contribute some
text from Opera that could summarize other examples of when MQs can be
useful?

Eduardo -- Could you write up the example of the usage you mentioned -
choosing a stylesheet using MQs?

Francois -- Is there an implementation matrix from the CSS group which
gives us some further data on which MQ features are supported in the
browsers that could give us some further insight on what to recommend
developers use / not use?

Dan

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Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 23:06:04 UTC