1ft Startup

If the internet is, as they say, a series of tubes, then a web site is a delicious milkshake. Over the last decade or so, tubes that people suck information through have become big enough that web developers provide thick, cold, jaw-droppingly rich milkshakes by the cowful. Life is great.

Now, trying to view a web page on your phone is like trying to drink a milkshake through a coffee stirrer. It’s very slow, and after a long time you’ll finally get a taste, or you’ll get nothing at all. Most people will give up even before they even find out.

The mobile web today sucks. The technology has been so bad for so long that users have given up on it. And it’s not only end users, but webmasters, and the fancypants design companies that sell web development, who have also seen the state of the industry circa about 2 years ago and thrown in the towel.

The truth of the matter is it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy in here: Webmasters think that mobile sucks, so they don’t try to make it not suck. Users try a page or two, experience the absolute horror of an un-adapted page, and never try again. How can we turn this self-loathing, destructive rut around*?

Companies like Google are trying to proactively correct the negligence of others by rewriting 500k broadband web sites into 2k, mobile-friendly pages on the fly. This is a neat idea but only really a stopgap to try to stop scaring users away from the technology. It’s not a real solution.

The only true way to unstick ourselves and get people onto mobile browsing is for us webmasters to provide a truly mobile-friendly site. More about what makes a good mobile site some other time; The first and most important thing we really must do is detect the nature of the incoming visitors and handle them appropriately. Below is a simple way that you can start building mobile support for your site.

Here’s the technical part: If you’ve got a fairly static site, an easy way to do this is to check the HTTP ‘accept’ header to see if a browser is specifically looking for wap content. If you’re running Apache, you can redirect users to another tree by adding something like this to your httpd.conf:

## Redirect all wap traffic to xhtml subdirectory.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/vnd.wap.
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /xhtml/$1

There are a couple caveats to this approach. First, this doesn’t handle WML-only devices. Second, this does not detect all handsets — some handsets think, foolishly, that they are all-powerful, and ask for “*/*” (every content type). To handle these (relatively few) handsets, you’ll really need to identify their User-Agent headers specifically.

Technically, this is the easiest way I know how to solve most of the problem in one broad stroke. If someone else knows something that would work better, I’d love to hear about it!

You can do this immediately and come back later to improve it — boring > aggravating: Even a static page or five, a placeholder, a cut-down slice of your functionality, to let users know that you haven’t forgotten about them, well, that’s a huge step in the right direction away from crashing every visitor’s phone.

* A brief pause for hypocrisy: theoreticlabs.com (or multitap-friendlier tlbs.us) does not have much available under its mobile site. Stay tuned, this will most certainly change! I’m not just saying that.