On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Arthur Richards
<arichards(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
Asher, I understand your hesitation about using
HTTP header fields, but
there are a couple problems I'm seeing with using query string
parameters.
Perhaps you or others have some ideas how to get
around these:
* We should keep user-facing URLs canonical as much as possible
(primarily
for link sharing)
** If we keep user-facing URLs canonical, we could potentially add query
string params via javascript, but that would only work on devices that
support javascript/have javascript enabled (this might not be a huge deal
as we are planning changes such that users that do not support jQuery
will
get a simplified version of the stable site)
* How could this work for the first pageview request (eg a user clicking a
link from Google or even just browsing to
http://en.wikipedia.org)?
I think mainly we need the tracking on the API requests... that's all
JavaScript-initiated, and all hidden from the user. The main problem with
adding parameters would be for caching .... but none of the API hits are
currently cacheable so that's not an immediate issue perhaps.
We also need to be able to differentiate between alpha/beta/stable versions
of the mobile site, without having to parse the cookie header (I believe as
a result of performance constraints around this? I think the analytics team
had looked into this previously).
--
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687