That’s where client-side solutions often fall short. No two business models are alike, and slightly different requirements could affect the way a website and its content are managed by its stakeholders. Admittedly, this might be far enough for companies that want to minimize the cost of development, but is it what every company really wants? From our long experience in the mobile space, we know one thing for sure: companies want control over the user experience. The Importance Of Device DetectionĬreating mobile websites with a pure client-side approach, including techniques such as progressive enhancement and responsive Web design (RWD), often takes one only so far. However, we strongly believe that reality is not quite that simple. The prospect of not having to invest in a device-detection framework makes client-side adaptation appealing to CFOs also. The concept of a “ one-size-fits-all” website is very romantic and seductive, thanks to the potential of JavaScript to make the device-fragmentation problem disappear. This has sparked the idea that client-side adaptation could ultimately make device detection unnecessary. This has allowed developers to take shortcuts and create full-fledged websites that partially adapt themselves to mobile devices, using client-side adaptation. With the advent of smartphones, a few things have changed, and many of the device limitations described above have been overcome. Device-detection solutions use various pattern-matching techniques to map these headers to data stores of devices and properties. The designers of the HTTP protocol anticipated the need to serve content to user agents with different capabilities and specifically set up the user-agent header as a means to do this namely, RFC 1945 (HTTP 1.0) and RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1). ![]() The most important HTTP header used for this purpose is the user-agent header. With device detection, the HTTP headers that browsers send as part of every request they make are examined and are usually sufficient to uniquely identify the browser or model and, hence, its properties. Thus, from the very earliest days of the mobile Web, device detection was a vital part of any developer’s toolkit. In this very limited environment, server-side device detection (“device detection” henceforth) was literally the only way to safely publish mobile Web content, because each device had restrictions and bugs that had to be worked around. Pages that didn’t cater to a device’s particular capabilities would often cause the browser or even the entire phone to crash. In fact, the phone browsers of the early 2000s were so limited that the maximum HTML sizes that many of them handled was well under 10 KB many didn’t support images, and so on. The History Of Sever-Side Device Detectionįirst-generation mobile devices had no DOM and little or no CSS, JavaScript or ability to reflow content. If your business has a Web presence, then you need fine-grained control over this experience and the ability to map your business requirements to the interactions that people have with your website.ĭrawing on the work of people behind the leading solutions on the market, we’ll discuss a useful tool in one’s armory for addressing this problem: server-side device detection. A good multi-device Web experience is fast becoming the new default. Losing Users If Responsive Web Design Is Your Only StrategyĪs we progress into this new age of the Web, a brand’s Web user experience on multiple devices is an increasingly important part of its interaction with customers.Lightening Your Responsive Website Design With RESS.Server-Side Device Detection With JavaScript.Your customers are now interacting with your website on countless different devices, whether you know it or not. #How to get calibre to recognize device PcThe expansion of the Web from the PC to devices such as mobile phones, tablets and TVs demands a new approach to publishing content. ![]() And if you disagree, would you like to write a rebuttal or counter piece? Leave a comment, too, and we will get back to you! Thank you. Do you agree with the author? Please leave a comment. Your customers are now interacting with your website on countless different devices, whether you know it or not.ĭisclaimer: This article is published in the Opinion column section in which we provide active members of the community with the opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas publicly.
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