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an open letter to mobile gateway providers
Dear Vodafone, Opera, Novarra, Nokia, and many others,
We applaud your efforts in making all of the millions of web pages available on the mobile phone. Sure, they don’t always work the way we would like, but the devices have small screens and typically don’t support advanced standards.
Good job!
We have one request: if a site provides a mobile optimized version, send the mobile optimized version to our users! We created it for a reason. Your automatic tools should not second-guess our intentions; they should not interfere with our relationship with our users.
Barbara Ballard
President
Little Springs Design, Inc.
2 Comments »
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Definitely so. I’ll add that the Google transcoder tries to get you to the mobile version of a site if it knows about it. The surest way is to tell it; put something like this in your web-oriented page:
That’s a pretty good, standards-based de facto standard for communicating the existence of a mobile page, so I hope other transcoders pick up on this too. They may, I can’t say I’ve tested this myself.
Comment by Sean Owen — September 21, 2007 @ 6:20 pm
Darn, that HTML tag did not come out right. Take 2:
<link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” href=”alternate_page.htm” />
Comment by Sean Owen — September 22, 2007 @ 11:15 am