On 01.03.2014, 0:41 Yuri wrote:
I just ran some stats on the 1/1000 sample logs for ZERO traffic. Due to nature of Zero - to bring Wikipedia to the developing world - we have to deal with lots of old phones. I would like to reopen WAP discussion before we put the final nail into the coffin or decide if this data warrants further investigation.
Wow, that UA parser managed to miss even a few iPhones!:) If we throw them away along with other stuff we know (Symbian, NetFront, Blackberries, newish Nokia and Samsumg feature phones) we will essentially have only MAUI and Dorado left. Currently we're mostly serving them HTML because they claim they support it in their Accept headers.
Examples: User-agent: 'MAUI WAP Browser' Accept: 'text/vnd.wap.wml,application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml,application/xhtml+xml,image/vnd.wap.wbmp,image/gif,image/jpg,image/jpeg,image/bmp,text/html,*/*;q=0.1' User-agent: 'Dorado WAP-Browser/1.0.0/powerplay/2' Accept: 'text/vnd.wap.wml,application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml,application/xhtml+xml, image/vnd.wap.wbmp, image/gif, image/jpg,image/jpeg, image/png, image/bmp, text/html,*/*;q=0.1'
From this, we can conclude that people with these browsers keep using Wikipedia which indicates that their browsers can actually digest our HTML view. And even if they didn't, there are very good reasons not to keep maintaining WML support: * We don't actually serve valid WML: http://i62.tinypic.com/27zxa14.png , and making it valid would be quite a task. * Our WML support is severely bitrotten and will remain this way unless we continuously spend time on it. * Spending engineers' time on something with usage share as small will take resources away from much more important goals of improved reading experience and contributory features for vast majority of our readers. And we've neved had too much resources.