As Advogato’s trust metric does not appear to trust me enough to allow me to post a reply, this is in reply to mchicago’s post about .Net and Browsercaps:
As someone who is currently in academia and will not qualify as an engineer for quite a while, I feel qualified to give you an unhelpful answer which has no practical application to your current real world problem.
Trying to keep up to date lists of every mobile device is like chasing the wind.
This is what Content Negotiation in the HTTP specification is for, in this case Server-driven negotiation would probably be preferable. A user agent should send an Accept header as part of the HTTP request which specifies which formats the user agent can render and the server should respond accordingly.
Unfortunately a lot of browsers send a wildcard instead of a real argument in Accept headers and claim to be able to render all formats, which of course they can’t. Apache has partial support for Content Negotiation and if you’re using IIS you’d probably have to write it yourself.
So the answer is to get manufacturers of mobile devices to get their web browsers to send proper Accept headers and Microsoft to think about Device Independence for their server products. Good Luck.
In other news…
tola.me.uk is nearly ready to roll, despite accidentally looking uncannily like Elliot’s web site. That’s what happens when you use stock themes! Once I’ve moved over, then hopefully interesting things will happen with hippygeek.co.uk
I’ve ordered a Nokia 770, I have evil plans for it.
Me and Sam spent several hours today trying to fix the BurnFM web stream, the web part is fixed but we can’t get the sound engineering part right. I blame poor sound engineering kit. A poor worker always blames his tools. Sam’s planning to swap out the server with one running slackware and icecast, I’ve almost convinced the station manager it’s a good idea. ‘Cept I vote for Ubuntu Server.
University are making me use Access 🙁
Now of to Tom’s to see how many people we can fit in his house, I reckon about 130.