I've found out a little more about the OpenWeb transcoder that US CDMA/EVDO provider Sprint is rolling out which I wrote about last week. If you missed that piece, Sprint has added a transcoder from OpenWave called OpenWeb to at least some of their WAP gateways. The stated purpose of OpenWeb is to transform full web pages that wouldn't be usable on handsets into something mobile friendly. The problem is that the OpenWeb software modifies the browser's http headers, removing some and adding others which breaks many off-portal content (ringtone, wallpaper, game) delivery services. OpenWeb also transcodes many mobile websites that don't need it, removing formatting, corrupting transparent GIF images and generally making the sites ugly and harder to use.
The main thing that's happened since Friday is that Sprint, after launching this thing in stealth mode at least a couple weeks ago, has issued a press release touting the product's features and is also reaching out to mobile developers in this thread on the Sprint Application Developer Portal (ADP) forum.
The Sprint Forum thread contains a PDF with some basic information about how the transcoder operates. If you have a mobile website you should read the document although I'm not sure how accurate it is.
The PDF suggests that the OpenWeb transcoder will not modify sites with urls matching the patterns *.mobi, m.*, wp.*, mobile.*, wireless.* and pda.* and that owners of mobile sites not matching those patterns should request that their sites be excluded by posting a request to the Sprint Developer Forum thread linked above. The document also claims that sites sending the cache-control no-transform header will not be modified.
Exclusion by domain/subdomain doesn't seem to actually be working, especially for m.* and *.mobi sites. I found that m.wapreview.com and yeswap.mobi along with lots of other sites including find.mobi, taptu.mobi and even m.gmail.com are still being transcoded. Requesting that your site be excluded does seem to work though. I requested exclusion for yeswap.com and mini.opera.com last Friday and they are both coming through un-modified now. Forget about cache-control no-transform though, yeswap.mobi and mp.wapreview.com both send it but get transformed anyway. I suggest that you submit a request for your sites even they are on *.mobi, m.*, etc. domains just to be sure.
Unless you have a Sprint handset there's really no way to tell if your site's being transcoded. If you do have a Sprint phone you can generally tell just by looking at the screen but if in doubt use the device's Show URL browser menu command. If it starts with http://sprint.aopwv.com/ you are being transcoded.
Which raises an interesting point. Some US and English speaking international mobile developers have heard of the Sprint/Openwave transcoding issue as it's been picked up by MobHappy
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posted by Dennis Bournique
March 18, 2008 @ 8:44 pm
7 View Comments
