[whatwg] RWD Heaven: if browsers reported device capabilities in a request header

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Feb 6, 2012 9:04 AM, "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On 2/6/12 11:42 AM, James Graham wrote:
>>
>> No, but there is a different *typical* screen size/resolution for
>> mobile/tablet/desktop/tv and it is common to deliver different content
>> in each of these scenarios. Although people could load the same site on
>> desktop and mobile set up to have the same viewport dimensions, it is
>> not that probable and, only one of the two is likely to be resized.
>
>
> It's very probable that a "mobile" or "tablet" screen will be zoomed in
various ways.  People do this all the time.
>
>
>> A typical thing that people want to do is to deliver and display *less*
>> content in small (measured in arcseconds) screen scenarios.
>
>
> This assumes that the entire page is onscreen at once, which is a pretty
bad assumption for said scenarios.
>
> I feel like I must be missing something pretty fundamental here.  Either
said "people" are assuming users never use zoom-and-pan type controls on
their devices or there's something more complicated going on.  What am I
missing?

I agree with Boris' points. Some high-end smart phones already have HDMI
outputs. Maybe people would start "docking" those devices to replace laptop
computers in near future.

> Sure.  I'm not entirely sure how sympathetic I am to the need to produce
"reduced-functionality" pages...  The examples I've encountered have mostly
been in one of three buckets:
>
> 1) "Why isn't the desktop version just like this vastly better mobile
one?"
> 2) "The mobile version has a completely different workflow necessitating
a different url structure, not just different images and CSS"

This might be a valid use case for a device capability API since different
devices may have completely different platform conventions for UI and
workflow such that using the same UI as the one served for desktop
computers isn't desirable.

- Ryosuke