[LINK] New Tabloid Sydney Morning Herald Fails Web Tests

[Scott Howard]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 5:30 PM, Tom Worthington <tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
> wrote:

> The web browsers on most smart phones and tablet computers don't identify
> themselves as "mobile" devices and so the standard website will be
> displayed by default. I could not see a link to the mobile version on the
> standard version.


Sorry, but this is simply wrong. Every major browser (and probably 99% of
all other browsers) on mobile platforms will identify themselves as a
"Mobile" device. They will do this in multiple ways - the most simple being
the user-agent string sent on every request which will include the word
'Mobile'.  eg, the the iPhone :
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 *Mobile/7A341*Safari/528.16

iPad :
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4
*Mobile/7B367*Safari/531.21.10

Android default browser :
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83)
AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 *Mobile *Safari/533.1

Some tablets, especially those with larger screens, will have an option to
not include the "Mobile" in order to default to the non-mobile site, but
it's almost always configurable.

There are also other ways for the website to detect things like screen
resolution, which will allow is to select which site to display based on
the resolution rather than the actual device type.

At least on my 2 Android devices this works perfectly on SMH - going to the
main site redirects me to the mobile site, unless I explicitly tell the
browser to request the desktop site in which case I get the full site.

  Scott