(keitai-l) Re: Details in user-agent strings

All

Is there any problem with the ML ? I'm getting the following

<keitai-l@appelsiini.net>: Command died with signal 9:
   "/usr/local/ecartis/ecartis -s keitai-l"

Final-Recipient: rfc822; keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Original-Recipient: rfc822;keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Action: failed
Status: 5.3.0
Diagnostic-Code: x-unix; internal software error


Hi Andrea,

The example is not wrong, there's a small misunderstanding on the
exact meaning of bytes in this case.

W24H12 refers to, as you guessed, a "screen size" (width and height)
in terms of number of characters, so W24H12 "should" (see after)
represent 24 characters in width and 12 characters in height possibly
shown on the screen without scrolling.
The story with the bytes has to do with the way you can encode the
different japanese alphabets (there's 3) and the number of bytes you
need to do it. I won't go into details as it's already confusing for
me, but you can have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Computer_encoding for some
explanations.

Anyway, I don't think you really want to care, since those numbers in
the user-agent string depends on the way the user configured his
phone, ie the same phone can have different numbers.
For example, I have a choice between small, medium and large in the
imode settings of my phone, so my user agent changes from having
W20H15 in the large setting to W30H23 in the small setting, and the
exact number of characters per line depends on their individual nature
(kanji, hankaku, zenkaku, etc see above)

I think you'll be more interested by the browser screen size in terms
of pixels, which is freely available here
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/screen_area/index.html
for docomo and on similar pages for other japanese carriers.
You'll see that on this table, you can also find a column called
"Screen area (Max. no. of full-width characters per line x max. no. of
lines)", cf above.

Finally, where exactly did you find this "portalmmm/2.0
K610im(c100;TB)" user agent, since AFAIK this is not a docomo phone
(whole list there
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/useragent/index.html
), not even a japanese handset, therefore I strongly suspect that none
of the docomo rules apply.

Regards
Stan

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 6:40 PM, Andrea Trasatti <atrasatti@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> we are working on a set of rules to gather information from user-agent
> strings of Japanese devices. I'm sure there's something around and
> that this is common technology in Japan, nevertheless we want to give
> it a shot.
>
> I was reading some docs on the DoCoMo site:
> http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/html/useragent/index.html#p05
>
> In the "Full Browser" section it describes the user-agent and says
> there's a parameter that will tell the "maximum size of data
> displayable on browser in bytes", but then the example gives "W24H12"
> that looks more like the screen width and height.
>
> Is the example just wrong?
>
> Also, looking at a number of user-agent strings it seems like the
> vendor name is sometimes not present as it used to be, for example,
> the Sony Ericsson K610 uses "portalmmm/2.0 K610im(c100;TB)".
>
> Help and pointing to more complete documentation (in English) would be welcome.
>
> Thank you,
> Andrea