[WikiEN-l] accessing Wiki on cellphone

[Neil Harris]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/15/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
>>     
>
> Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go
> through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like
> en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
>   
Just a thought:  mobile phone and PDA users will generally be using 
specialized browser software, doing so through HTML-to-WAP gateways, or 
proxies that attempt to simplify pages for rendering on small screens. 
If we could auto-detect these by User-Agent string, and use a custom 
skin for these clients, we could greatly improve the experience for 
small-screen users.

I've found lists of mobile client browser strings at

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html and
http://www.cantoni.org/2005/02/03/mobile-ua

Google's wireless proxy apparently reports itself as

"Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google 
Wireless Transcoder;)", according to 
http://cleverhack.com/2006/08/06/google-wap-proxy-user-agent/

and some information on the i-mode user agent is provided here:

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/tag/s2.html
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/spec/useragent.html

There is a sourceforge project that provides a LGPL'd Perl class for 
mobile user agent sniffing which claims to work correctly for over 2000 
different mobile devices:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobileuseragent/

-- Neil