[webkit-dev] Default viewport value on WAP DTDs

Sat May 5 04:58:32 PDT 2012

Hi there,

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:
> I see. That's unfortunate. I don't really know the best path forward here.
> I'm inclined to agree with Alexey that we should at least try to standardize
> this before committing code. It's not clear to me where this should be
> specced. Easiest path forward is to make this proposal to both
> whatwg at whatwg.org for the HTML spec and www-style at w3.org for the CSS Device
> Adaptation spec.

I will pass it by the CSS Device Adaptation spec first as I really
think it fits there.

> We'll see what the response there is and can decide what to do next based
> off that response. Does that sound OK?

I think we will add a feature flag for now, together with layout tests
for a document with XHTML-MP doctype using and not using fixed
layouting.

> I'm reluctant to make a change like this, but it sounds like there might not
> be a better choice. One concern I have is how many sites would break due to
> this behavior? For example, will this fix sites on N9, but break them on
> Android/iOS or are these wapforum doctypes never sent to Android/iOS because
> of UA-sniffing?

It can only break browsers respecting the viewport meta and using
fixed layouting in some way, those currently mobile browsers. As far
as I heard Android and iOS are using similar tricks but they seldom
get the pages due to UA sniffing. I already tried contacting the
Android team.

Cheers,
Kenneth
> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
> <kenneth.christiansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Nokia actually looked into this about a year ago and we homogenized
>> our UA strings across our different devices, so that we could start to
>> tell contents providers to give us the best content supported by our
>> browsers. Part of this work was actually simplifying our UA string so
>> much as possible and it is actually quite similar to what you are
>> using today.
>>
>> The user agent for the N9 browser, for instance, is:
>>
>> Mozilla/5.0 (MeeGo; NokiaN9) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko)
>> NokiaBrowser/8.5.0 Mobile Safari/534.13
>>
>> The problem is not just the user agent. For instance the user agent is
>> known by your Google, and we did pass validation for Tier 1 YouTube
>> content, but the Google search team, as far as I heard, decided that
>> we didn't have enough market penetration for them to turn on Tier 1
>> content for us, and serves us the XHTML-MP (Tier 3?) content instead.
>>
>> As far as I understand, the decision comes from that team not wanting
>> to dedicate resources to make sure the Tier 1 content keeps working on
>> our device. I totally understand their reasoning and decision, but it
>> is a saddens me given the promise of the open web and HTML5. It is
>> even more sad that this is not a unique case and it will only be
>> solved the day content providers stop looking at the user agent
>> strings.
>>
>> Kenneth
>>
>> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:
>> > Instead of UA faking, is it possible for you to pick an actual UA string
>> > that is more compatible with the web at large? For Chromium we
>> > experimented
>> > with making the most minimal UA string possible without a big loss in
>> > web
>> > compatibility. To our disappointment, we found we had to match the
>> > Safari UA
>> > string almost exactly. Our current UA string is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux
>> > x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1096.1
>> > Safari/536.6". The parts that we found to be safe to change are the
>> > platform
>> > names in the first sent of parenthesis. The version number after
>> > AppleWebKit. And the Chrome/versionNumber section. Even getting rid of
>> > the
>> > Safari/versionNumber caused us significant web compatibility problems.
>> >
>> > That said, we did all this testing in 2008. The web may have changed
>> > considerably since then. In either case, if your UA string diverges too
>> > much, I expect this problem will just be the tip of the iceberg of
>> > compatibility problems you'll encounter. So it might be worth
>> > considering
>> > changing your UA string before trying to add new DocType switching
>> > behavior.
>> >
>> > Ojan
>> >
>> > On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Hugo Parente Lima
>> > <hugo.lima at openbossa.org>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Friday, May 04, 2012 10:11:07 AM Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
>> >> > On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Kenneth Rohde Christiansen <
>> >> >
>> >> > kenneth.christiansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > > This is not supporting XHTML-MP, as we are not implementing
>> >> > > anything
>> >> > > special to support it. We are basically showing the content as it
>> >> > > was
>> >> > > HTML5 and that solves most real use-cases. Injecting a proper
>> >> > > viewport
>> >> > > configuration makes it also layout properly.
>> >> >
>> >> > Okay. Is this change observable by the page? Or more specifically,
>> >> > can a
>> >> > web page currently feature-detect whether a given browser support
>> >> > XHTML-MP
>> >> > by checking the size of the viewport?
>> >>
>> >> The page knows nothing, just as it knows nothing about the ~980 pixels
>> >> used
>> >> for the canvas width, it's a matter of change a magic value to the
>> >> device-
>> >> width to get websites better looking.
>> >>
>> >> I attached screenshots of MiniBrowser runnin with and without the patch
>> >> using:
>> >>
>> >> MiniBrowser --window-size 480x720 http://m.yahoo.com
>> >>
>> >> Without patch (viewport of 980 pixels):
>> >> https://bug-85425-attachments.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=140272
>> >> Patched (viewport of 880 pixels)
>> >> https://bug-85425-attachments.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=140273
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> > If the answer is yes, then we'll be breaking the feature detection.
>> >> >
>> >> > Unfortunately most unknown mobile browsers tend to get lots of
>> >> >
>> >> > > XHTML-MP. Heck, we even get that for google.com on the Nokia N9 :-(
>> >> > > as
>> >> > > well as other high profile sites.
>> >> >
>> >> > Yeah, it's very unfortunate.
>> >> >
>> >> > This makes the sites render acceptable, until we can advocate the
>> >> >
>> >> > > sites to accept our user agent, something which we haven't always
>> >> > > had
>> >> > > luck with. Google for one didn't want to provide us the Tier 1 site
>> >> > > of
>> >> > > google.com on the N9, even though it works a lot better than the
>> >> > > XHTML-MP version we are being served. I don't see this situation
>> >> > > change any time soon.
>> >> >
>> >> > Can we work-around this issue by faking the user agent string?
>> >>
>> >> If you are working on your own browser you wont be telling every
>> >> website
>> >> that
>> >> you are a iPhone forever, at least you will not be happy doing that.
>> >>
>> >> Regards.
>> >> Hugo Parente Lima
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> webkit-dev mailing list
>> >> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
>> >> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>> >>
>> >
>> >
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>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
>> Senior Engineer
>> Nokia Mobile Phones, Browser / WebKit team
>> Phone  +45 4093 0598 / E-mail kenneth at webkit.org
>>
>> http://codeposts.blogspot.com ﹆﹆﹆
>
>

-- 
Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
Senior Engineer
Nokia Mobile Phones, Browser / WebKit team
Phone  +45 4093 0598 / E-mail kenneth at webkit.org

http://codeposts.blogspot.com ﹆﹆﹆