Dear Web People

[andrewducker]

I appreciate the effort you put in to produce mobile versions of your sites that I can read more easily on my phone.

And I appreciate that you automatically detect that I am using my phone to use your site, and forward me to said mobile version of your site.

However, I frequently send long pages home to myself, to read later on my shiny 21" screen.

And when I do so, it would be nice if you had a link on the mobile version of the page that took me to the desktop version.

Because otherwise I find myself faffing around with URLs to try and work out where said desktop version is.

And I don't like that.

Thank you!

Comments

[matgb]

The more I learn and understand about mobile versions, the more I dislike the auto detection thing across the board.

They should be using @screen media CSS files for all the fancy formatting, and just pushing the colour scheme through for mobile devices.

That they don't do this is frequently evidence that the main site has too much extraneous crap on it.

My big bug bear is the other way around, both Blogger and BBC News are really badly coded, and there's no link to a mobile version at all.

[emceeaich]

From you lips to the ears of the VP for New Media at the NHL, the mobile versions of the team sites are less than useless.

[buddleia]

I find Instapaper/Read it Later (www.instapaper.com) really handy for this kind of thing.

[andrewducker]

Sadly not supported on Android.

I use ReadItLater instead, which also has a plugin for Firefox, which I find terribly useful.

[andrewducker]

io9 manages a halfway house, whereby I can change the url from:
http://m.io9.com/5730895/swine-flu-gives-its-survivors-supercharged-immunity-could-create-universal-flu-vaccine
to
http://io9.com/5730895/swine-flu-gives-its-survivors-supercharged-immunity-could-create-universal-flu-vaccine
to get to the desktop version, but the link at the bottom of the page marked "classic view" actually takes you to the front of the normal site, rather than the normal version of the same site.

Possibly a "rel" that told the browser that there was a desktop/phone version would help. Or different CSS that could be selected. Or maybe just a ^&*^&* link on the %*^&*^& page!

Ahem.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Some sites do indeed let you do this. I recall the Guardian being pretty good at this.