I agree, some interesting points in there and in the related discussions Obviously a big use case is going to be analytics. What browsers and devices comprise your web traffic. These are very important and telling metrics.
Performance is definitely a big one and goes back to the idea of backend responsive design. Frontend responsive design is half css viewport width and half js logic. Once your content is non trivial, this is a huge pain. I have worked on several large frontend responsive projects and they all differ in the technology they used to achieve frontend responsiveness and the overall support across all the different widgets and elements. In the end, the performance of the product is poor (across the mobile ecosystem) and that lessens usability. Remember, im talking about sites with non trivial content. Blogs and news sites are pretty trivial these days. I think as DeviceMap matures, it can be a pretty solid backend responsive framework. I defintely dont want to get caught in the politics of this, but as someone who has experience building these kinds of sites, backend responsive is by far the most easiest and flexible to write. Anywhere I have an HTML template, I can make another one which targets mobile, clean and simple! But this assumes you are working with a solid device detection product. For us, the DDR update mechanism needs to polished so projects can easily always be running the latest and greatest DDR. Also need to get started on our 2.0 push with better browser and OS detection. Then its just a matter of letting the engineers use this product as they see fit when building their solutions :) But remember, are charter now clearly states, our goal is the data first. Classification and use cases second are second. So im happy making sure we have the best and most open DDR. --- From: eberhard speer jr. <[email protected]> To: "'[email protected]'" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2014 3:17 AM Subject: Why parse UA ? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, just FYI, although the article focuses on client-side detection [nothing wrong with that] the answer to the question "Why Parse the User-Agent?" is one you don't hear very often : performance. Also some fun 'nutty' quotes from 'experts'. http://www.jefftk.com/p/why-parse-the-user-agent esjr -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJUcZgGAAoJEOxywXcFLKYc7SsIAKDzwpQMoojtQRN1b57ASuPd 5QHY2+LLnE7QMWkvjaXo38eC68K5yPoX5TqLaneBpr9kW7YE7aXDDVr37eGT9LGC sH8p5DzOPeLx/WcBDNoG7b+Xn+OQ8PNLtf5+LWNnakpp74F0zSgsx1k8UwDqsZoM U6HcqXoHYnXBLRieA5AfeYPZAm20q2+gnhpHDVgFPhT54hrCXkTD+AmAP7tOYqB8 Jidt1Osu0fl3IPSJ7VXiaM9E6eatG6FPOc5vUpSRKWkZ0X2qwiSuoc9oI5K2I/2V olHopeWBljeQZQI9li0NPNhKg+mq9DyvQbPqmRKGBfDrsmEiJPO9QnYNaKNj/A8= =7uOL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
