News
Infogin agrees to do nice transcoding only
Tim Green May 21 2008, 12:54pm
InfoGin has signed a petition that calls for responsible ‘transcoding’ of web pages for mobile.
Major unrest has been building among developers since some operators have begun transcoding web pages to make them work better on the mobile screen. That sounds fine, but the systems can also end up transcoding pages that have already been formatted for mobile. When this happens, some features – such as advertising – can be disabled.
Understandably this infuriates those that build or manage mobile internet sites. It’s led to the developer Luca Passani creating the ‘Developer Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting’. This document calls from transcoders to detect mobile aware sites and handle requests in a transparent manner.
InfoGin, a transcoder, has now signed up and will comply with the Manifesto guidelines. Its Intelligent Mobile Platform technology will ensure sites are requested with the original device’s user agent, thus enabling mobile aware sites to return the mobile version instead of the web version. The returned site is identified as either web or mobile.
Luca Passani said: “I was really pleased to see that InfoGin endorsed the rules in the Manifesto and signed it. This is warmly appreciated by the developer community."
