url to alternate mobile site

[hp3]

Not sure if anyone will answer this question, but I'll ask anyway.

what are some standard ways to provide alternate content for mobile users in the context of a web site?

For example, it seems one standard way to provide an alternate mobile site is to use a wap domain.

So you have
www.company.com for the regular site

and
wap.company.com for the mobile site

in the imode community it seems common to create a subdirectory for mobile content.

www.company.com/i/

any other common approaches?

[Dowapdalilly]

Hi Hayden,
another possibility on the server-side, is looking at the browser doing the request and redirecting/reformatting content appropriately (eg. for Pocket IE)...

cheers,
Andy

[hp3]

hi andy,

good to hear from you.

using the server side certainly is a desireable approach. Note that my question was not specific to Flash mobile content. I wonder if there is a common denomitor to look for in detecting mobile vs. desktop pc browsers through the user agent.

I know that imode devices include the phrase "imode" in the user agent, so that family of devices is easy to detect.

Is there a common denominator string to check for in the user agents of other XHTML/WAP browser and devices?

[Dowapdalilly]

Hi Hayden,
i've been around on FK occasionally, but i'm getting a shiny new iPaq tomorrow so i thought i'd see what the mobile forum was like..

i'm not too sure about wap browsers so i've just had a look at what user-agent header my Nokia 3330 sends, and surprisingly enough it's: Nokia3330/1.0 (03.12)

so you could possibly look for the phrase 'Nokia'(Ericsson, etc), but it might not always be a wap browser...

i would say the easiest way to determine if a wap browser is requesting something, is to look at the 'Accept:' header, as it's probably safe to assume that if the browser accepts 'text/vnd.wap.wml' then it's a wap browser...

i'd suggest the following if you wanted one url as an access point to all your content...

-build up a list of user agents for various browsers/markup languages (this would be a useful sticky topic for this forum)...

-separate your content into different folders (or use subdomains if they're easy to setup with your isp), such as '/wap','/html','/ppc', etc.

-create a homepage php script which will redirect the browser to the correct location on your server by 1st looking at the accept header (to check for wap browsers), then the user-agent to differentiate between Desktop IE and PocketPC IE...

if i find out anything more about mobile user-agents, then i'll let you know.

cheers,
Andy

[hp3]

I have seen some scripts that take this approach. I seem to recall that the user agent list also includes micro browsers too. I was a little hesitant to take this approach just because you never know when a new user agent makes the scene.

it would be a good community effort (not neccessarily this one) to maintain a listing of micro browser user agents.

I'll ask more about this at forum.nokia.