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

[James Graham]

On Mon, 6 Feb 2012, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> On 2/6/12 11:42 AM, James Graham wrote:

> 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"
> 3) "We'll randomly lock you out of features even though your browser and 
> device can handle them just fine"

The example I had in mind was one of our developers who was hacking 
an internal tool so that he could use it efficiently on his phone.

AFAICT his requirements were:
1) Same URL structure as the main site
2) Less (only citical) information on each screen
3) No looking up / transfering information that would later be thrown away
4) Fast => No extra round trip to report device properties

AFAIK he finally decided to UA sniff Opera mobile. Which is pretty sucky 
even for an intranet app. But I didn't really have a better story to 
offer him. It would be nice to address this kind of use case somehow.