5 Oct 2006 Chicago   » (Journeyer)

.Net & Browsercaps
I've been working really hard on our new product (spam alert Momo-it.com) but we're having problems with mobile devices and getting the best possible rendering.

Now to explain the situation first - we don't use the .Net controls to generate the page, instead we use the browser capabilities of .Net to work out if html, wml or xhtml should be rendered (where I am specifying xhtml as designed for mobile devices).

The problem appears where we have a mobile device which is slightly more advanced (PDA's like the XDA or PSP etc). Here we get conflicting information. We are told that either they can handle full websites (And therefore we are sending them a html website) or we are told that they are only capable of rendering WML.

Now we want to give the consumer the best user experience possible, so we have to overload the browsercaps section of our configuration but the problem is there dosn't seem to be a suitable existing one that we can grab to use, which is a real pain - we will have to write a tool to enable customer support to enter individual phones as being xhtml compatible and then use that to populate the servers with an updated browsercaps file.

Thats not to say that there are several people out there who have very good browsercaps files - they just all seem to be based on 'normal' browsers not mobile devices.

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