Posted by atrasatti 3 years 44 weeks ago
Mobile Genius
Jon just posted on the mobiForge blog about a new initiative by the WURFL community to try to "regulate" how transcoding proxies work and behave, Responsible Reformatting.
Ruadhan posted a useful link to a W3C Task Force, the Content Transformation Task Force, that in my opinion is doing the very same thing. Of course the two documents have a very different approach, we have a very vocal and emotional approach from the developers that are disappointed by the current situation and on the other hand we have a committee working to write detailed guidelines.
It seems to me like both initiatives are going in the same direction and actually they are saying mostly the same things. I'd be interested to collect more opinions here and have a discussion, that will hopefully eventually influence the W3C Task Force. I really think the two initiatives should not be separate, but rather join forces. In the "Manifesto" we have a collection of developers of mobile sites and in the W3C we have a group of big companies such as Vodafone, AT&T, Novarra and ourselves, of course. But what I think we are in a very good position here, as both documents describe more or less the same concepts, so I do not see why they should remain separate.
Posted by pbjose 3 years ago
Totally in agreement with you on this one.
Putting emotion and politics aside, and putting the future of the mobile web and users first, most people (developers and networks) would have to be in agreement there.
It is clear we have to learn to live together in this “ecosystem”. Networks need the developers (for they create the content which in turn creates the interest and traffic). Developers need the networks for they provide the “pipeline”.
All seems logical, but I guess the challenge is getting this (i.e. collaboration) to work in practice. Who is in the best position to mediate?
I would have said the W3C, but are they doing enough?
Can you (dotMobi) take that mantle?
It seems to me that we are at a cross roads that will dictate the future of the mobile web. Wonder which path will be taken?
As a developer company, we feel there is little we can do to influence the selected path.
P. Barros Jose
MD
mdatalogic.com
Posted by jonarne 3 years ago
Yes, Luca's initiative might be similar or even the same as W3C's work. I would be happy to sign the W3C initiative as well, if it only was an option.
It would be great if all initiatives could join up and stand behind a common way of handling transcoding.
But the transcoding issue is here NOW, and for those of us who experience it every day, it is serious. In my opinion it is currently destroying more and more of the mobile web because every installation of a transcoder has different ways of doing the transcoding. I believe that this is due to lack of rules or guidelines. When discussing the case with mobile operators Content Transformation Guidelines 1g is close to useless. There are no rules. The mobile operators does not know what to demand form their supplier. "The Manifesto" does the job better for now. It clearly states what to do and don't. This is great help when talking to mobile operators and content providers.
For those of you that have been working with/for mobile operators know that their view on mobile internet can be a bit difficult to understand. "This is my network and my end users, so I can do what I want" they say. Working for a mobile operator in the past, I can understand this statement. Some does not see mobile internet over the telecom network as a part of internet as we know it, either. But what they do understand is the voice of the developers who are making the revenue generating applications for their network and their users. In this setting "The Manifesto" is valuable, and the main reason for me signing it.
So do we need both? For now, Yes. I am all for standards, both standard-standards and ad-hoc-standards, thats not the point. The Manifesto has been created for a reason. Probably, the most important effect is the one we are experiencing now: This discussion and the fact that transcoding is on the current mobile agenda. I believe Jose in the previous post put it quite well in his post: "As a developer company, we feel there is little we can do to influence the selected path." The Manifest is for most of us the only way to influence the agenda
When the work of Content Transformation Task Force is done, hopefully we will have a common understanding of this domain and no vocal manifestos are needed. But in the mean time...?
-- Jon Arne S.
Posted by atrasatti 3 years ago
Mobile Genius
Jose, we are trying to do our part and in fact the editor of the document is our Jo Rabin and I can tell you he spends a lot of time in that group. If you go check the e-mails (public archive) you will see that he has been driving most of the work done.
We are not a standard-body, so we hardly take the responsibility of writing our own standards, but what we do is write articles and style guides, that's our way of doing it and we try to do it every day.
Unfortunately, even if Luca could pull together a document in just a few days, that does not mean that every proxy will respect the rules tomorrow and actually I'd be curious to know how many mobile sites use the "no-transform" in the Cache-Control header today. Note that we wrote an article about this back in September 2007 called Setting HTTP headers to advise transcoding proxies, so it's nothing new and I could almost say "it WAS invented here".
Andrea Trasatti
DeviceAtlas, mobile device intelligence