Well, this is actually quite a fascinating discussion, and brings out
several troublesome issues with the web.
Before I try to generalize some of these issues, let's look at one of
Andreas' specific examples: his paper at:
http://andreas.web-graphics.com/mobile/
In terms of working on multiple devices, this is a pretty darn good try.
But I think it quite well demonstrates the issue with trying to make
content "universal." Here are some issues with various devices that I
see off-hand.
1. Mobile devices. On my DoCoMo keitai, because it's a UTF-8
document that uses non-ASCII characters, I get random kanji in
various places (in the middle of a sentence where there's an m-dash,
for example), and ill-displayed markup in others (such as "next
»" instead of "next >>"). Links to footnotes do not work.
Section 5, at 7.2K, works ok on my newer keitai, but on older Docomo
phones that have not enabled 10K instead of the default 5K pages,
it will not download completely. Overall score: readable, in most
cases.
2. Print devices. The pages display fine for printing, but if I want
to print the document, I have to go to the first page, print it, go
to the second page, print that, go to the third page, print that
again, and so on. Some web pages print on less than half of a paper
page, others take up more than one. Some printed pages have "prevous
| overview | next" at the top and bottom, and there's a copyright
at the bottom of some printed pages but not others. Footnotes are
often on a different page from their reference. Overall score:
inconvenient and ugly.
3. Computer ("screen") devices, when saving to a file for local
access. Hm. Do I save this to five files? Do I save the pieces and
then try to edit them all together? Probably the easiest option is
just to cut and paste the text from each page into a text file.
Overall score: very inconvenient, and may require manual clean-up.
One big issue is, given several different versions of a page, do you use
different URIs, or the same URI, and if you use the same URI, do you
serve different content or redirect?
1. Same URI, serve different content. The advantage of this is that
you have only one URI for references, bookmarks, and so on. That
is, of course, assuming that you don't have a multi-page document,
or that your document is supposed to be multi-page on every device
(with the problems described above for printers and saving to
a file).
The biggest problem here is that, given the number of different
devices in the world, it's easy to get it wrong, and when you get
it wrong, the end-user is stuck. Say I have a phone where it's most
comfortable for me to read your article as PDF. How do I download
it? On a PC, how do you distinguish between me wanting to read it
on screen and wanting to print it, or save it to a file? Not to
mention which, search engines generally won't like you if you serve
different things on the same URI.
2. Same URI, redirect based on content. This eliminates the issue
with search engines, but also eliminates much of the single-bookmark
advantage of serving the same content; if the user bookmarks a page,
or just copys the URI his browser displays and sends it to someone
else, in almost all cases he'll be sending a URI for a particular
version for his device, not the URI that redirected him.
3. Different URIs based on content. The user has to pick. This seems
to me to be the best option. It gets rid of most of the disadvanages
of the options above, and, given a small index page that links to
the various formats available, indicates clearly to the user where
the best place to which to link is.
Something like the "saving to a file" issue mentioned earlier may seem
trivial at times, but there are cases where it can be critical. For
example, at merchantsofdeception.com, Eric Scheibeler chronicles some
nasty experiences he's had with Amway. They're busy trying to sue him,
and there's quite a decent chance that he could be forced any day to
take down his site. (This has already happened to others in the same
situation when they finally ran out of money for lawyers to defend
themselves.) So it's very important to him that people be able easily to
download and keep their own copies of his 300-page book. How do do you
do this with a URI or URIs that work on all devices?
BTW, Andreas, your TAB example may not be particularly good. When I use
http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/, I'm almost constantly getting the message
"Size of this page is not supported," and the layout is adequate, but
not terribly comfortable on a keitai.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Fri Dec 9 00:50:27 2005