http://www.osnews.com/story/6191/OSNews_Mobile_Version_2_Now_Online Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:39:31 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I have always appreciated OSnews's mobile version, it's great for reading on PDAs. The new version seems nice, too.

I do have to say though that perhaps a little more distinction between stories would be nice. The old one was a little more clear when stories began and ended (on the home page). This made it easier to quickly scroll through the list and scan the stories. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 09:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Yes, this is because I took out the BORDER=1 from the news story tables, because the textmode browsers were looking very "boxy" if I had the borders ON and don't wanna do a yet different version for textmode browsers (for simplicity sake . I don't believe this will be a major problem with small screen devices though. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 09:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I might turn on the borders back on though if the color version of AvantGO doesn't look good. If anyone has a screenshot of his/her color Palm with Avantgo rendering the new osnews, please send it over for me to check it out. My Palm is a PalmV and so it is not color. The PalmOS simulator is a bit of a pain to use with installed conduits like AvantGO and synchronize so I can't use it in this case. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 09:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Why there is no content for WAP pages? Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Because of major incompatibilities between WAP browsers.
There is just not a way to make sure that a WAP page that has a bit of content will even load on many (buggy) phones. It is just too risky with the current situation, so we decided to take the most simple design, just a few tags that are known to work across most phones, and only provide minimal information (just the 15 latest headlines). As many in the phone industry say, WAP sucks, and now there is proof for it: http://www.kiskeya.net/ramon/quotes/wapsucks.html :-) Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Couldn't all this be done with valid CSS and XHTML? Why waste time ($$) with an different page, browser sniffers and all that when valid XHTML & CSS could handle all of this? Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? "Valid XHTML & CSS" wouldn't handle any of this, you obviously don't know about what kind of browsers we are talking about. Most of these browsers mentioned in the article can _barely_ render tables and have form support!

Please refer here for more: http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5961&offset=30&ro...

I have rest my case on this months ago, I won't get into a new flamewar about this again please do not post about this stuff again. We have already discussed it in the osnews forum a gazillion of times. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? With AvantGo for Palm it's posible to 'sync' a page for offline use. With al linkdepth of one it will not only cache the article but also the printer friendly version. It's not very common to connect a palm to a printer so it's mostly useless to cache the printer friendly version. Some articles are split into 4 pages. I can only read the first page (remember the linkdepth) of such articles. The solution is to read the cached priter friendly version.

The solution is to only provide printer friendly (read one page) versions of articles to mobile users to keep the cache and required linklevel low. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Actually this is not a good idea. This would only be a good idea for textmode browsers on fast PCs and "advanced" PDA browsers (more than 4 MB of FLASH etc).

But on phones, this would mean browser crashes or "out of memory" errors.

Just now I was talking via email to a japanese osnews reader who can't get his J-PHONE to render the whole frontpage of osnews because of memory problems (after lots of emails, he finally read in his manual that only HTML pages up to 12 KB will be rendered!). While most "normal" phones today (not smartphones) will be able to manage up to 35 KB of HTML rendering, putting a big multi-page article in a single page, it will just kill compatibility with these phones.

> It's not very common to connect a palm to a printer so it's mostly useless to cache the printer friendly version.

I disagree. If it does the job for you (instead of cashing a story.php with a multipage article), just cache the printer one instead.

Doing a mobile site that is as "full" in fucntionality as the osnews one, it has a lot of "gotchas" that desktop web developers would never consider under normal circumstances. "Fixing" one kind of these browsers completely undermines the others. I tried to find a balance when designing the new site. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, my only nitpick with the design of the site is all the empty space. I would like the main table to be width=98-100% and it seems to be, like 85-90%. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Please tell me what device/browser you got (helper: http://www.osnews.com/ua.php).

FYI, all tables on osnews-mobile have width of 100%. If one of the supported mobile browser doesn't do that, is its bug or it just doesn't support percentages in table widths. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Congratulations on the new pda site. I actually use my palm to read OSNews quite often, and the site looks excellent on my Palm T3 in both portrait and landscape views using Web Pro. I much prefer using a browser to avantgo, which doesn't offer extended screen views. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I think OSNews should worry about having properly coded HTML on the *main* site before continuing on their venture of "mobile editions."

Have any of you actually looked at the markup? It's a freaking mess. Font tags are bad enough, but when used *in addition* to CSS? What's that all about? Table-based layout? That's pretty 1997. And don't even get me started on the ton of invalid attributes being thrown about like they belong there.

Aesthetically, OSNews is not bad, but god does it need an HTML overhaul in the worst way. You can't "Explore the future of computing" when your ankle is shackled to the past. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Please do not post off topic and destroy a wonderful discussion we have right now about the mobile site.

Second, OSNews is not over here to get the latest and greated XHTML and CSS, it is here to render well on all OSes, and that HAS to mean HTML of 1997. Check my previous comment.

If we were doing 3D games, our site would be Flash-based, but we do geek news, and we have many readers browsing to us with the most WEIRD browsers ever, including using OSes as Multics and VMS! This has to mean one thing: good, old HTML 3.2 and some CSS for link beautifying *ONLY* if it doesn't break these browsers.

OSNews renders great on EVERY browser, and so as long as it does that, I am happy. That was the goal. Not w3c validation, but rendering to as many browsers as possible.

Please do not reply on this topic, we have talked about this a gazillion times and it is offtopic (the main side will not change anyway for a long long time):
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=639
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=766
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2799
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5961 Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > Actually this is not a good idea. This would only be
> a good idea for textmode browsers on fast PCs and
> "advanced" PDA browsers (more than 4 MB of FLASH etc).
I'm using a Palm Zire with 2MB storage for the OS, browser, ebooks and websites.

> But on phones, this would mean browser crashes or "out
> of memory" errors.
I get the point.

> putting a big multi-page article in a single page, it
> will just kill compatibility with these phones.
But now it kills compatibility with pda's and other offline readers.

> It's not very common to connect a palm to a printer so it's mostly useless to cache the printer friendly version.

> If it does the job for you just cache the printer one
> instead.
Maybe it's a good idea to add a cache friendly mode to the mobile version. (some quirck line mobile.php?cachefriendly=true)

> Doing a mobile site that is as "full" in fucntionality as
> the osnews one, it has a lot of "gotchas" that desktop web > developers would never consider under normal
> circumstances. "Fixing" one kind of these browsers
> completely undermines the others. I tried to find a
> balance when designing the new site.
I know. I really like the beatifull KISS layout of both the desktop and mobile version of OSNews. It just works and looks great and renders fast. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 13:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Thank you very much! Sat, 28 Feb 2004 14:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I can't believe all the platforms that osnews can support. Great job. I even learned about other forms of browsers like those text based ones. Oh the good old days of text and command lines !!!! LOL. Getting old man, old. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 17:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I want to commend OS-News for the good job they did with their mobile pages. I changed the user agent on Firefox to Lynx running under TRS-DOS to access them. Contrary to what the article said, they don't look like crap on displays over 640x480. I think they look better that the more complex, normal pages. Simplicity remains a virtue. Nice job! Sat, 28 Feb 2004 18:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I own an imode phone (DoCoMo).
I live in belgium, where base is the de facto provider for the imode service.
Here is the exact output from ua.php.

portalmmm/2.0
N341i(c10;TB)

hope this helps...

- Kevin Sat, 28 Feb 2004 18:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I don't own any sort of PDA, but its nice to know the site I read most often is more than readable on just about anything (Wish the WAP version could be expanded on a bit, but I understand your point that WAP just don't work well accross phones).
I remeber using google on WAP to load the main html page on it just to read more than the headlines on holiday last year, on a Nokia 6210 i must be obsessed Sat, 28 Feb 2004 19:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > Maybe it's a good idea to add a cache friendly mode to the mobile version. (some quirck line mobile.php?cachefriendly=true)

I could bring back the "read story in a single page" link, only for the mobile browsers. I took this feature out of the desktop osnews version a year ago because sites were keep linking to that one... Sat, 28 Feb 2004 20:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I just bought a PDA yesterday, HP iPAQ 4355 and went to OSNEWS on it a second ago, saw the story, and laughed.Site looks great on it. Sat, 28 Feb 2004 21:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Keep up the good work! Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? This is what I have always loved about this site,no matter how I access it it just works,Be it on Net+ in BeOS,the imbedded QNX browser on my 3com Audrey,The imbedded Browser on my Alcatel WebtouchOne Phone,or Dillo,Links or whatever in Linux.I'm a big fan of liteweight browsers and I think much stuff is way overdone on most sited,and out here in the perrimeter where I live and dialup is the only way to access the net a person wants a fast liteweight browser to speed up the process and doesnt want to compound things by using a huge slow bloated mess like IE or Mozilla,so this makes it better even on the desktop for me because I can use one of the stripped down or text based alternatives to come here,and not have to wait for a bunch of java or flash powered crap to load Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Ok guys, BORDER=1 is back on tables for better readability and the "printer-friendly" page is now fully compatible with the mobile browsers (we are not denying the page --as we do in the desktop version of osnews-- if the REFERER environmental variable is not set, which is something common on phones Sat, 28 Feb 2004 23:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I'de be interested by minimo screen schots .

--
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/ Sun, 29 Feb 2004 06:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? At least one page on the internet which looks out for their mobile users. Thought I didn't know it works even on my DoCo
Mo (P504iS), it always looks very cool on my Zaurus. The only thing I miss in the new versions are the little icons for articles. Is it possible to mark it with Text, or Something so you know to which group the article belongs?
*sigh* I wished other pages (slashdot, newsforge, my local newspaper, etc) had also so cool pda/mobile phone webpages.

and if my stupid digi cam battiers wouldn't be empty right now I'd post screenshots from my mobile gadgets showing osnews Sun, 29 Feb 2004 15:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > The only thing I miss in the new versions are the little icons for "related articles". Is it possible to mark it with Text, or Something so you know to which group the article belongs?

This feature still exists, it just doesn't have a different icon for each story (to save bandwidth)!
It is the fourth icon (the one that looks like a pile of documents) in the row of little 16x16 icons, as seen here for example: http://www.osnews.com/img/6146/ppc2.png Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Just tried it with my Dreamcast.
Your au.php says:
Mozilla/3.0 (DreamKey/2.0)


http://temp.funtech.org/DSCN0379.JPG Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments