Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 18:09 -0600, Donovan Brooke wrote: Mari Masuda wrote: [snip] For a concrete example of responsive design in action, point your browser to http://www.sasquatchfestival.com/ and then slowly make the window wider/skinnier to see how the design adapts to different viewport sizes. Very nice... makes for an easy display to a wide range of circumstances I think.. especially image resizing (in the blog example), which looks pretty smooth. But, in both the examples, it appears it can produce a choppy user experience when resizing the window as well... I suppose that resizing could be viewed as one of those 80/20 percent rule things.. meaning, window resizing is probably not a prevalent action for a user and it could be argued that one shouldn't code a site worrying too much about dynamic window resizing... but then there is a form of resizing, which is turning your iPAD to landscape view, etc.. I suppose one could probably still do some UA detection and serve up content based on the type of UA (ie. mobile, IE, game-based) and at that point, still incorporate responsive web design, but to that more-limited-category of UA's. Donovan -- D Brooke There is only one drawback to using CSS media queries to alter the way a page is displayed on different resolutions, and that is that any media (i.e. background images, etc) referenced in a stylesheet is downloaded, regardless of if it is ever used. So if you have two background images for the body, one large for nice wide screens, and a smaller one for smaller screens, they will both be downloaded by the browser. The way around this is to use Javascript to load only the stylesheets required, but then you're relying on Javascript and you don't need media queries. It's a pain finding the right balance. -- Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
There is only one drawback to using CSS media queries to alter the way a page is displayed on different resolutions, and that is that any media (i.e. background images, etc) referenced in a stylesheet is downloaded, regardless of if it is ever used. Another one worth mentionning is that a lot of mobile devices still in use do not support media queries - their being a relatively recent development. Same goes for javascript, even if it claims to support it. Older Blackberrys claim JS support but fail miserably in real life. Marc -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Feb 6, 2012, at 4:01 PM, Stuart Dallas wrote: Generally speaking you're better off with a design that automatically adapts to the viewport on which it's being displayed. While there's more than one reason for this, the overriding reason is that the same software (i.e. the same user agent) could be running on any size of device, from watch to huge flat panel screen on a wall. I think the world needs to move on from is it a mobile device or not to accepting the reality which is that the browser / OS is irrelevant, and that the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Responsive designs such as that described in the A List Apart article Mari posted are fantastic tools for achieving this goal. -Stuart Agreed. Not only the size of the display -- but what's a size of a pixel? http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-pixel-identity-crisis/ Presentation is a difficult problem to solve, but I don't think PHP enters into the equation. From my view, the only thing that PHP can do is device-sniff, which is clearly a losing proposition. I believe that a presentation solution will be solved by presentation languages (i.e, client-side). Cheers, tedd _ t...@sperling.com http://sperling.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Nice article!! You should read up on responsive web design. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ should get you started. HTH!= -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? Different browsers, some of which are worse than IE (see Blackberry). 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Nothing so specific or easy to identify as i am a smartphone. Depending on your target audience, simple regex checks for the strings iphone, android, etc. can do the trick, but if you want specific details about the device... 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? ... the WURFL database and things akin to it or based on / stolen from it can help parse the header string and return a plethora of information about it (screen size, AJAX ability, markup capacity, etc). Marc -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Paul M Foster wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Paul Hi Paul, I think this is a great PHP conversation.. and I don't understand why GOTO threads always get way more replies than something like this ;-) Diverse User Agent compatibility is going to be more and more of a challenge for us.. gone are the days of a few known browsers that are viewing our sites. From bots, to browsers, to mobile devices, to game UA's, to app UA's.., to IE's stubborn outlook on the web... the idea of user experience is growing complicated! ;-) I really liked Mari's posted link to the a list apart blog about responsive web design using media query (CSS).. however, it seems to me that it takes the use of many languages and techniques in many cases to get the job done... user agent serving (using PHP or JS or alike), flexible CSS and web design, and a keen eye on your target audience may all play apart. However, this is a PHP list.. and I think we can better approach this topic by limiting our scope to talk about how PHP could be useful. My first question, being that my first language is not PHP, is; is their any core PHP mobile detection functions/tools that exist? I have a running list of mobile UA's that I picked up somewhere that I often use and edit to distribute content accordingly. I also have a PHP mobile detection script that I picked up somewhere. I'm sure these things can be found via google as well. The problem, as Mari's link suggests, is that UA list's and browser sniffing scripts need maintaining quite regularly, since mobile UA's are being added on a weekly basis perhaps. Many of my projects do some PC UA (browser) sniffing.. especially for IE., as IE has it's own system that it uses for how to render content. Anyway, I'm happy to share what I have.. but like I said, PHP is not my first language, so I am interested to see what the more established PHP'ers may have to say. Donovan -- D Brooke -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Paul M Foster pa...@quillandmouse.comwrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? Both, although more and more smart phones join the ranks of the desktop-quality browser every day (iPhone and Android both have very capable browsers, with the iPhone's omission of flash support being the biggest difference between these two.) 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but that gets complicated quickly: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? To supplement the alistapart link already mentioned, here's another recent writeup: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/how-to-serve-the-right-content-to-mobile/ I develop mobile games and websites, and I never use the User Agent to alter site/presentation. Media queries and types are the way I handle this (sometimes creating separate mobile resources, but most of the time creating designs that adapt accordingly.) All this to say, I don't use PHP to handle this aspect of the development. Adam -- Nephtali: A simple, flexible, fast, and security-focused PHP framework http://nephtaliproject.com
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 14:28 -0600, Donovan Brooke wrote: Paul M Foster wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Paul Hi Paul, I think this is a great PHP conversation.. and I don't understand why GOTO threads always get way more replies than something like this ;-) Diverse User Agent compatibility is going to be more and more of a challenge for us.. gone are the days of a few known browsers that are viewing our sites. From bots, to browsers, to mobile devices, to game UA's, to app UA's.., to IE's stubborn outlook on the web... the idea of user experience is growing complicated! ;-) I really liked Mari's posted link to the a list apart blog about responsive web design using media query (CSS).. however, it seems to me that it takes the use of many languages and techniques in many cases to get the job done... user agent serving (using PHP or JS or alike), flexible CSS and web design, and a keen eye on your target audience may all play apart. However, this is a PHP list.. and I think we can better approach this topic by limiting our scope to talk about how PHP could be useful. My first question, being that my first language is not PHP, is; is their any core PHP mobile detection functions/tools that exist? I have a running list of mobile UA's that I picked up somewhere that I often use and edit to distribute content accordingly. I also have a PHP mobile detection script that I picked up somewhere. I'm sure these things can be found via google as well. The problem, as Mari's link suggests, is that UA list's and browser sniffing scripts need maintaining quite regularly, since mobile UA's are being added on a weekly basis perhaps. Many of my projects do some PC UA (browser) sniffing.. especially for IE., as IE has it's own system that it uses for how to render content. Anyway, I'm happy to share what I have.. but like I said, PHP is not my first language, so I am interested to see what the more established PHP'ers may have to say. Donovan -- D Brooke Keeping a PHP angle to this, have you looked at using an up-to-date browscap.ini file with PHP? Basically, you can use that to read in the raw user agent string from the browser, and it then finds a matching entry in the ini file and gives you back some values about what it can assume about that device, such as whether it is known to support Java (although this is something you should be careful of, as it only tells you if it's is supported, not if there is an available JVM), if it is a mobile or search bot, what version of CSS it should support, etc. I use it myself in a personal web stats script, and as long as you keep the copy of the ini file recent, you should be OK. -- Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On 6 Feb 2012, at 05:58, Paul M Foster wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: There are simulators available for most smartphones. 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? The trend is certainly moving towards full desktop capability, but personally I still think that if you expect a significant amount of traffic from mobile devices then your site should adapt accordingly. 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but there's no standard at the moment so detection requires something similar to https://gist.github.com/1124666. That code is pretty old, and I can't remember where I got it, but at the time it worked really well. 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Generally speaking you're better off with a design that automatically adapts to the viewport on which it's being displayed. While there's more than one reason for this, the overriding reason is that the same software (i.e. the same user agent) could be running on any size of device, from watch to huge flat panel screen on a wall. I think the world needs to move on from is it a mobile device or not to accepting the reality which is that the browser / OS is irrelevant, and that the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Responsive designs such as that described in the A List Apart article Mari posted are fantastic tools for achieving this goal. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Adam Richardson simples...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Paul M Foster pa...@quillandmouse.comwrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? Both, although more and more smart phones join the ranks of the desktop-quality browser every day (iPhone and Android both have very capable browsers, with the iPhone's omission of flash support being the biggest difference between these two.) 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but that gets complicated quickly: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? To supplement the alistapart link already mentioned, here's another recent writeup: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/how-to-serve-the-right-content-to-mobile/ Apologies, I sent the wrong link last time: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-mobile-web-optimization-guide/ Adam
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Although I mostly agree with this statement, it ignores the most interesting aspects of mobile technology, such as being able to ask the user for their GPS location and deliver content accordingly. I worked on some real estate websites that would show the user the houses for sale within a certai distance from where they were standing, and then leverage Google Maps for a get directions from where you are feature. The Mobile Web list has had some interesting discussions regarding this stuff... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mobile-web/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On 6 Feb 2012, at 21:12, Marc Guay wrote: the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Although I mostly agree with this statement, it ignores the most interesting aspects of mobile technology, such as being able to ask the user for their GPS location and deliver content accordingly. I worked on some real estate websites that would show the user the houses for sale within a certai distance from where they were standing, and then leverage Google Maps for a get directions from where you are feature. The Mobile Web list has had some interesting discussions regarding this stuff... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mobile-web/ On the contrary, my statement dealt only with the way a site renders, not the content it renders. We should definitely be taking advantage of the additional features of mobile devices where it makes sense because that's where the real game-changing power lies. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 02:28:42PM -0600, Donovan Brooke wrote: Paul M Foster wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Paul Hi Paul, I think this is a great PHP conversation.. and I don't understand why GOTO threads always get way more replies than something like this ;-) See religion (n), defs 1-10. Diverse User Agent compatibility is going to be more and more of a challenge for us.. gone are the days of a few known browsers that are viewing our sites. From bots, to browsers, to mobile devices, to game UA's, to app UA's.., to IE's stubborn outlook on the web... the idea of user experience is growing complicated! ;-) Well, cursory research shows there are at least 12 different major layout engines underneath modern browsers. Multiply that by versions of same, different OSes on which each run, versions of the OSes themselves, etc. etc. etc. I don't envy the job of any piece of code which tries to analyze all this. Plus, I believe that in the future, handhelds (specifically smart phones) will approach desktops in screen resolution. I really liked Mari's posted link to the a list apart blog about responsive web design using media query (CSS).. however, it seems to me that it takes the use of many languages and techniques in many cases to get the job done... user agent serving (using PHP or JS or alike), flexible CSS and web design, and a keen eye on your target audience may all play apart. Not to mention that W3C has all but abandoned its efforts to standardize HTML5. They will likely follow the path of browsers in simple de facto standardization. However, this is a PHP list.. and I think we can better approach this topic by limiting our scope to talk about how PHP could be useful. My first question, being that my first language is not PHP, is; is their any core PHP mobile detection functions/tools that exist? From what I've seen, only the get_browser() function, which depends on the existence of a browsecap file, which may or may not be installed on your system. And if it is, it's 300K in size, and introduces significant latency to page loads as a result. I have a running list of mobile UA's that I picked up somewhere that I often use and edit to distribute content accordingly. I also have a PHP mobile detection script that I picked up somewhere. I'm sure these things can be found via google as well. The problem, as Mari's link suggests, is that UA list's and browser sniffing scripts need maintaining quite regularly, since mobile UA's are being added on a weekly basis perhaps. I suspect that's more as a result of everything sniffer scripts do. They don't just detect the platform, but a variety of other things as well. Many of my projects do some PC UA (browser) sniffing.. especially for IE., as IE has it's own system that it uses for how to render content. Anyway, I'm happy to share what I have.. but like I said, PHP is not my first language, so I am interested to see what the more established PHP'ers may have to say. How about this: those of you with iPhones, Androids and the like, point your phones at a page which reports $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (like a page which runs the phpinfo() function), and post what you get back from that exercise and what device made the query. I'd like to see if there is anything significant which indicates handheld platforms. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 09:02:34PM +, Ashley Sheridan wrote: [snip] Keeping a PHP angle to this, have you looked at using an up-to-date browscap.ini file with PHP? Basically, you can use that to read in the raw user agent string from the browser, and it then finds a matching entry in the ini file and gives you back some values about what it can assume about that device, such as whether it is known to support Java (although this is something you should be careful of, as it only tells you if it's is supported, not if there is an available JVM), if it is a mobile or search bot, what version of CSS it should support, etc. I use it myself in a personal web stats script, and as long as you keep the copy of the ini file recent, you should be OK. The issue with this (according to the get_browser() docs) is that the browsecap file is 300K long, will get longer, and significantly slows loading of your applications. Moreover, the parsing of the UA string and other data is far more extensive than anything I'd want or could use. The only thing I'd want to know is whether I'm serving pages to a handheld or desktop device. From what I've seen, pages built for handheld devices (see, for example, yahoo.mobi) are considerably stripped down, often with no CSS styling. For now, if I have to make the decision on whether to serve up desktop or handheld versions of a page, all I want to know is a yes or no answer to the question of, Is this a handheld? The native PHP get_browser() function appears to be overkill for that, and may, in fact be insufficient. That was the origin of the original questions-- was there some definitive way of knowing the platform when the page request came in. And from all the research I've done, the answer is, No. The UA string may not work as intended. There are javascript sniffers and CSS triggers, but neither are they definitive. For example, the CSS triggers test for resolution or screen width or the like. This is fine, so long as handhelds remain at crappy resolutions. But I don't expect that to be the case forever. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Ashley Sheridan wrote: [snip] Keeping a PHP angle to this, have you looked at using an up-to-date browscap.ini file with PHP? Basically, you can use that to read in the raw user agent string from the browser, and it then finds a matching entry in the ini file and gives you back some values about what it can assume about that device, such as whether it is known to support Java (although this is something you should be careful of, as it only tells you if it's is supported, not if there is an available JVM), if it is a mobile or search bot, what version of CSS it should support, etc. I use it myself in a personal web stats script, and as long as you keep the copy of the ini file recent, you should be OK. Interesting, I will check that out. Donovan -- D Brooke -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Stuart Dallas wrote: On 6 Feb 2012, at 21:12, Marc Guay wrote: the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Although I mostly agree with this statement, it ignores the most interesting aspects of mobile technology, such as being able to ask the user for their GPS location and deliver content accordingly. I worked on some real estate websites that would show the user the houses for sale within a certai distance from where they were standing, and then leverage Google Maps for a get directions from where you are feature. The Mobile Web list has had some interesting discussions regarding this stuff... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mobile-web/ On the contrary, my statement dealt only with the way a site renders, not the content it renders. We should definitely be taking advantage of the additional features of mobile devices where it makes sense because that's where the real game-changing power lies. -Stuart Right, the OP doesn't state the purpose exactly (design, function, etc..)... but even if it was design, as noted in Mari's link toward the bottom, responsive web design is not supported the same in all platforms... this is why I think, in many situations, a mix of UA detection and versatile design is still relevant (even in design). Donovan -- D Brooke -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 04:04:28PM -0500, Adam Richardson wrote: On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Adam Richardson [1]simples...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Paul M Foster [2]pa...@quillandmouse.com wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? Both, although more and more smart phones join the ranks of the desktop-quality browser every day (iPhone and Android both have very capable browsers, with the iPhone's omission of flash support being the biggest difference between these two.) � 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but that gets complicated quickly: [3]http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html � This gets directly at the answer, but also proves that there's no practical way of using the information. There are simply too many variations, and more to come. Great reference. I didn't find it in my prior research on Google. 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? To supplement the alistapart link already mentioned, here's another recent writeup: [4]http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/how-to-serve-the-right-content-to-mobile/ Apologies, I sent the wrong link last time: [5]http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-mobile-web-optimization-guide/ Adam Thanks, Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 09:01:45PM +, Stuart Dallas wrote: On 6 Feb 2012, at 05:58, Paul M Foster wrote: This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: There are simulators available for most smartphones. 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? The trend is certainly moving towards full desktop capability, but personally I still think that if you expect a significant amount of traffic from mobile devices then your site should adapt accordingly. 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but there's no standard at the moment so detection requires something similar to https://gist.github.com/1124666. That code is pretty old, and I can't remember where I got it, but at the time it worked really well. 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Generally speaking you're better off with a design that automatically adapts to the viewport on which it's being displayed. While there's more than one reason for this, the overriding reason is that the same software (i.e. the same user agent) could be running on any size of device, from watch to huge flat panel screen on a wall. I think the world needs to move on from is it a mobile device or not to accepting the reality which is that the browser / OS is irrelevant, and that the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Responsive designs such as that described in the A List Apart article Mari posted are fantastic tools for achieving this goal. I'm inclined to agree. In fact, my daughter, who owns an iPhone, hates the mobile-only webpages and will normally opt to see the full (desktop) website, even on her iPhone. She'd rather gesture around the original website than see a vastly simplified version with everything vertically stacked, as it often is on strictly mobile sites. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Paul M Foster wrote:
[snip]
How about this: those of you with iPhones, Androids and the like, point
your phones at a page which reports $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (like a
page which runs the phpinfo() function), and post what you get back from
that exercise and what device made the query. I'd like to see if there
is anything significant which indicates handheld platforms.
Paul
Logical, but I can save you that step :-) as I've been there done that..
Here is a PHP script (uses $_SESSION) for mobile users that I have found
to work fairly well. I'm absolutely sure that it contains false
positives, and potentially other minor bugs.. as it's just hard to keep
up with the ever changing UA's... but it's a start.
If it gets munged from email returns, I can zip it up.
Donovan
*INCLUDE IN HEAD
--start
?php
// ** Make sure to replace URL with your mobile URL below **
// Head
include('device_detect.php');//
session_start();
$is_mobile = mobile_device_detect();
if ($is_mobile) {
header(Location: URL);
die();
}
?
--end
SAVE TO A FILE CALLED 'device_detect.php'
--start
?php
// device_detect.php
function mobile_device_detect(){
//check if force pc is requested
$forcepc = isset($_REQUEST['forcepc']) ? $_REQUEST['forcepc']: 'false';
if ($forcepc == 'true') {
$_SESSION['forcepc'] = 'true';
return false;
} else if (isset($_SESSION['forcepc'])) {
$forcepc = $_SESSION['forcepc'];
if ($forcepc == 'true') {
return false;
}
} else {
$_SESSION['forcepc'] = 'false';
}
if (isset($_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'])) {
return $_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'];
}
//check if a profile header is indicated
//this is a very good indication it is a mobile device
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE']) ||
isset($_SERVER['HTTP_PROFILE'])) {
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
}
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; // get the user agent
value - this should be cleaned to ensure no nefarious input gets executed
$accept = $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']; // get the accept header value
switch(true){ // using a switch against the following statements
which could return true is more efficient than the previous method of
using if statements
case (eregi('ipod',$user_agent)||eregi('iphone',$user_agent)); // we
find the words iphone or ipod in the user agent
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case
(preg_match('/(nokia|sonyericsson|samsung|up.browser|up.link)/i',$user_agent));
// we find palm os in the user agent - the i at the end makes it case
insensitive
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case (eregi('android',$user_agent)); // we find android in the user
agent
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case (eregi('opera mini',$user_agent)); // we find opera mini in the
user agent
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case (eregi('blackberry',$user_agent)); // we find blackberry in the
user agent
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case (preg_match('/(palm
os|palm|hiptop|avantgo|plucker|xiino|blazer|elaine|treo)/i',$user_agent));
// we find palm os in the user agent - the i at the end makes it case
insensitive
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case (preg_match('/(windows ce; ppc;|windows ce; smartphone;|windows
ce; iemobile)/i',$user_agent)); // we find windows mobile in the user
agent - the i at the end makes it case insensitive
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case
((strpos($accept,'text/vnd.wap.wml')0)||(strpos($accept,'application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml')0));
// is the device showing signs of support for text/vnd.wap.wml or
application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml
$_SESSION['mobiledevicedetect'] = true;
return true;
break;
case
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
Mari Masuda wrote: [snip] For a concrete example of responsive design in action, point your browser to http://www.sasquatchfestival.com/ and then slowly make the window wider/skinnier to see how the design adapts to different viewport sizes. Very nice... makes for an easy display to a wide range of circumstances I think.. especially image resizing (in the blog example), which looks pretty smooth. But, in both the examples, it appears it can produce a choppy user experience when resizing the window as well... I suppose that resizing could be viewed as one of those 80/20 percent rule things.. meaning, window resizing is probably not a prevalent action for a user and it could be argued that one shouldn't code a site worrying too much about dynamic window resizing... but then there is a form of resizing, which is turning your iPAD to landscape view, etc.. I suppose one could probably still do some UA detection and serve up content based on the type of UA (ie. mobile, IE, game-based) and at that point, still incorporate responsive web design, but to that more-limited-category of UA's. Donovan -- D Brooke -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have their own stripped down versions of browsers? 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Headers on smart phone browsers
On Feb 5, 2012, at 9:58 PM, Paul M Foster wrote: [snip] 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a webpage)? [snip] You should read up on responsive web design. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ should get you started. HTH! -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
