On 02/06/2012 11:05 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
On 2/6/12 3:20 PM, James Graham wrote:
1) Same URL structure as the main site
OK, makes sense.
2) Less (only citical) information on each screen
Why not do this for the "desktop" version as well?
Alternately, if it's nice to see the information at a glance on desktop,
why not make the UI such that this information is at the top in both
versions and the less-critical information is effectively below the fold
on mobile? I realize that this may be more work and that there may be
other constraints here, but it seems like that would be ideal in this
situation.
This basically amounts to "the requirements were wrong". Since the same
developer made both the desktop and mobile frontends and he is one of
the major users of the system, and the mobile frontend was purely
scratching his own itch, I find it very difficult to justify the
position that he ought to have wanted something different to what he
actually wanted and made.
In general the idea that sites/applications should be essentially the
same, but perhaps slightly rearranged, regardless of the device they run
on just doesn't seem to be something that the market agrees with. It
seems to me that we can either pretend that this isn't true, and watch
as platform-specific apps become increasingly entrenched, or work out
ways to make the UX on sites that target multiple types of hardware as
good as possible.
3) No looking up / transfering information that would later be thrown
away
Again, this seems to apply to desktop as well.
Of course. The critical point was that there was different information
in the two cases. The unacceptable solution here would have been to
compute the union of all possible information required but only display
the relevant subset.
4) Fast => No extra round trip to report device properties
Agreed that this is desirable.
This is the only property that is currently hard to achieve in
conjunction with the others. If one gives up this requirement one can
simply download a minimal framework, detect whatever device properties
you like through the DOM and then pull down the rest of the site. The
only problem is that this introduces — possibly significant — extra
latency. One can avoid this by browser sniffing. Which never causes
problems. Obviously.
So it seems to me that we have a problem that real people are hacking
their way around by using techniques that are known to be suboptimal or
downright harmful. Therefore we should take the desire for a solution
seriously, even though I agree that sending the device screen size, or
some sort of nebulous "device class" in the HTTP header isn't good enough.
