Support of Handheld Web Browsers

[David T. Ashley]

I noticed that my brokerage house as well as gmail present different (i.e.
simpler, more compact) interfaces when I surf them with my handheld (a
Blackberry) versus a desktop or laptop computer. How is that done? I've
got to assume something in the HTTP headers lets the server software know?

Thanks.

[CptDondo]

David T. Ashley wrote:

I noticed that my brokerage house as well as gmail present different (i.e.
simpler, more compact) interfaces when I surf them with my handheld (a
Blackberry) versus a desktop or laptop computer. How is that done? I've
got to assume something in the HTTP headers lets the server software know?

Thanks.

Read up on WML.

Also look up http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ .

--Yan

[shimmyshack]

download user agent switcher addon for firefox, fire it up and import
<useragent
description="pocket pc mobile 2003"
useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC;
240x320)"
appname=""
appversion=""
platform="windows mobile edition 2003 sp2"
vendor=""
vendorsub=""
/>

shove in that as an entry, (I think you can save as a file ad import if
you cant be bothered to type)

when accessing
http://www.google.com/

their hacked version of apache (GFE/1.3) just checks the user-agent
header and redirects to
http://www.google.com/pda

from there on, you will be looking at a simple version and whatever you
click will be passed through a filter as long as you keep pda in the
url.
This way the rewrite condition based on user-agent header is done once
- I should imagine there is a long list and it would be ineffecient to
do it for each request once on /pda/... you can verfiy this by
returning your user-agent header back to firefox default and pressing
refresh, you will remain on the simple version, however navigating to
http://www.google.com will return you to the complex browser oriented
version.

you can a long list of user-agents from the url given by the previous
respondant, if you are willing to use a little xslt on the 4.1MB
wurfl.xml.