The Modem is in Vogue, Again
I am a big fun of having the web’s huge and rich information available on mobile phones — it is really useful for the user to be able to browse the web with the mobile phone’s browser.
Some time ago I was wondering how this ‘mobile browsing’ experience can be improved, and at that point I was thinking that server-side page adaptation is the answer. In this approach, the web application generating the pages uses techniques such as User-Agent sniffing to detect that the client is a mobile phone, and returns a page specially-tailored for a mobile browser.
But now I realize that this approach is fundamentally flawed. It puts the burden on the web application developer to generate two parallel sets of outputs (one for desktop, one for mobile), and the hard part is keeping these two in sync. The problem is that the mobile version will get behind the desktop version, and the mobile user may be put in the paradoxical situation of wanting to browse the desktop version rather than the mobile version.
And the technology advances: my old mobile phone had a 128×128 screen, but now 240×320 is the norm for feature-phones (a feature-phone is the phone that is not as smart as a smart-phone). And the IPhone has a large QVGA screen (320×480). Such devices come closer and closer to displaying normal web pages, so the content-adaptation becomes less critical.
The solution that I see now is different: forget content-adaptation — instead design a single set of content, but take into consideration that a (growing) percentage of the users will be browsing from a mobile phone. So: keep the pages clean and streamlined, favour text instead of large graphics (text scales better), and keep the page size small.
Because the data connection on a mobile phone is slow, and often costs by amount of data transferred (not flat fee as on the desktop), it is important to keep the (total) page size small. This will greatly improve the browsing experience on the mobile phone.
In history there was a moment when most users were connected to the internet through a modem, with a maximum speed of about 5 KBytes/s. At that point, there was a lot of advice on the web on the lines of: keep the size of your web page under 10 KBytes — it would take so and so many seconds to download a web page of that size over the modem, etc.
I think it would be a good mind-set for present day web developers if they imagined that 20% of their users… are connected to the internet through modems again. So, forget the 1MByte (including images, ajax libraries, etc) web page, cause it takes 200 seconds to download it over the modem.
It’s true though, this new modem is getting faster…
Disclaimer: This blog expresses solely my own personal opinion — it is not endorsed by and does not represent the opinion of my employer.