Dear website people, your solutions suck

[andrewducker]

If you can instantly forward me over to the mobile version of your site
when I access you over my phone then you could just have served me up the
mobile version of it at the same url in the first place.

If you can't manage that then the least you can do is put a link on each
mobile page which redirects back to the desktop version of the site.

Some sites manage this very well (Tumblr just works, for instance).
Frankly, in this day and age your content and your layout should be
entirely separate anyway and you should just be serving different CSS to
me.

It is ridiculous that I should visit a link emailed to me by a friend, be
shuffled over to the mobile site, save it to read later, and then be stuck
reading the mobile site on my desktop with no easy way back.

Worst of all being YouTube, where mobile URLs don't even display the video
if you view them on the desktop.

Please handle this better.

No love,

Andy

Comments

[pseudomonas]

For the Guardian I've got a rule for the "Redirector" firefox plugin that works round this, but it's a hacky approach.

[flick]

Even worse are the sites where you follow a link, get redirected to the mobile site, and then don't get directed back to the mobile version of the page that you initially requested....

[andrewducker]

Yes - and vice versa.

Sites that just prepend "m." onto the url I can live with, but ones where removing that doesn't convert back to the identical desktop site bug the hell out of me.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

my pet hate is sites that won't let you look at the non-mobile site on your phone....

[dougs.livejournal.com]

RT

[andrewducker]

Thank you, you just reminded me to post this to twitter!

I really must find a way of posting all of my posts _except_ for my daily post to Twitter.

[zz]

how about you just be happy you're living in the future, hmm?
kids these days...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> If you can instantly forward me over to the mobile version of your site when I access you over my phone then you could just have served me up the mobile version of it at the same url in the first place.

Not really. At least, no easily with a lot of systems. Because rather than have the device detection once at the bootstrap process, and then essentially build two of everything dependent on domain, you need to bake device detection into every page.

On Drupal 6, the current version until a few months ago, that was a total pain in the arse. It's not hugely better on D7.

Basically, mobile browsing has come along too quickly for most systems -- even open source ones -- to adapt to suddenly having multiple channels where before there was only one.

[andrewducker]

you need to bake device detection into every page.

They already do that - if I open any Guardian web page in the browser on my phone then it detects that I'm on a phone and redirects me to the mobile version of the page.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I mean you have to bake it within the system that's creating the page structure.

Argh -- hard to explain, but when it comes to Drupal, you have to bake it into every panel, view, node template, context, and whatever other modules you are using to create what you see at a particular URL. Whereas redirecting you just do once in hook_boot().

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha. Yup, that makes sense.

Get it fixed!

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's being worked on for Drupal 8. As in, there's no way in hell D8 is getting released without decent multi-device support in from core up. I'm just trying to get myself hired by a firm that'll pay me enough gardening hours that I can put some work into that!

(As it's a biggie. Because list most CMSs out there, it's basically an HTML machine aimed at the desktop, with the occasional path that spits out RSS or AJAX. So the whole thing has to be rejigged.)

[andrewducker]

Two methods of "Fixing It"
1) Don't redirect to the mobile version, just serve the mobile version instead, at the same URL. Same effect, different URL.

2) Offer a link at the bottom of every page on the mobile site that links to the equivalent page on the standard site.