There has been a lot of discussion in recent days on Luca's Manifesto. I just wanted to note that the W3C Content Transformation Task Force is working with industry players to find a resolution to this difficult problem. The goal is to reconcile the objectives of those various players particularly "to help provide users with an acceptable experience of the Web on Mobile". I represent dotMobi on the Task Force and in fact am the editor of the Guidelines that the Task Force is producing.
The two main use cases are a) Content Providers who provide a tailored mobile user experience don't want their content messed up and transforming proxies should leave their content alone. b) Many content providers, unfortunately, don't provide a tailored user experience for mobile and often provide an unusable experience for mobile users. Sometimes, to add icing to the cake, they say "we don't recognize your browser". We at dotMobi believe (and this is also the position of the Task Force) that creation of specially tailored mobile experiences is generally desirable and things that disrupt the delivery of those experiences are altogether counter-productive. Content Transformation does have an important role to play in allowing access from mobile to the desktop Web that hasn't seen the error of its ways, yet.
There are a lot of complex issues here, and unfortunately HTTP itself does not say much to help resolve them. This means that the work is proceeding cautiously, of necessity, since a balance of objectives must be taken into account and care must be taken not to break anything on the way. This is against a background of a number of existing transformation implementations in the field that seem clearly to be making life even harder for the mobile community than it is already, and disrupting people's livelihoods. Producing guidelines that state industry consensus is clearly urgent. As a starting point we (dotMobi) have been suggesting that Content Providers use the Cache-Control: no-transform and Vary HTTP Headers (see http://mobiforge.com/developing/blog/content-transformation-addendum-web-browsing-style-guide).
The manifesto makes a number of useful contributions to the discussion, but in other respects doesn't achieve the objective of helping to provide, as far as possible, a reasonable User Experience of the Web as a whole. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the manifesto seems to address use case a) to the exclusion of use case b). It is really important to address this use case, since in practice people who deploy transformation solutions won't be motivated to change them unless their objectives can also be achieved. Tom Hume makes a similar point.
Francois Daoust, the W3C Team Contact for this activity, in his post illustrating some of the issues in more detail and inviting public participation in the whole process. Andrea has started a forum on this topic – see http://mobiforge.com/forum/developing/device-detection/content-transformation-guidelines-or-rules-responsible-reformattin. As I say, this is a complex area and calling people names doesn't solve any problems. On the other hand working together patiently will produce positive results.
