OpenWeb and InfoGin Adopt the Developer Manifesto!

I have an update on the Openwave OpenWeb transcoder that US CDMA/EVDO provider Sprint rolled out last month. This time the news is good. To recap, the transcoder is intended to make full PC websites usable with the limited browsers of feature phones - which it does. But it also had a negative effect on the usability and appearance of some mobile web sites and broke many off-portal ringtone, wallpaper, game sites to the point that content downloads stopped working.

This is after similar problems with transcoders implemented last year by Vodafone in the UK, Ireland and Portugal which are still largely unresolved. The mobile web development community, lead by WURFL co-creator Luca Passani, reacted by creating a document called Rules for Responsible Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto which offered suggestions on how content reforming could work without harming sites and services created specifically for mobile browsers

Unlike Vodafone and its transcoding partners Novarra and ByteMobile, Openwave and Sprint responded to the Developer Manifesto by opening a dialog with Luca and other developers to work out a compromise where some of the language in the manifesto was softened and Openwave agreed to sign the Manifesto. Within 24 hours a second transcoding vendor, InfoGin also signed.

Yesterday Sprint and Openwave held a webcast and open chat on Sprint's Application Development Portal to discuss OpenWeb and present a roadmap for changes being made to meet the Manifesto's rules.

Presenters were Openwave's OpenWeb product manager Ed Moore, Geoff Martin, manger of Sprint's Mobile Web division, Sprint engineer John Davis and Raymond Reeves, head of Sprint's Application Developer Program.

Highlights of the presentation were:

• Within 5 weeks Sprint will deploy Version 2 of OpenWeb. This is an interim release designed to minimize the disruption mobile content as quickly as possible. It will implement "Mobile Fetch First" meaning that the transcoder will first request content using the browser's original unmodified headers including the User Agent. OpenWeb will only change the User Agent if the site returns an "unsupported browser" type of message or no content at all. V2 will also perform minimal or no reformatting of sites it recognizes as intended for mobiles. The minimal reformatting is only to fix invalid markup, work around browser bugs and split pages that are known to be too large for the target browser to display. PC sites will continue to get the full transcoding treatment, of course. Version 2 will still rewrite link URL's to point to the sprint.aopwv.com domain. Like Version 1, it will not have end to end encryption of traffic to secure mobile sites. The data stream from the handset to OpenWeb will be encrypted but it will be decrypted on the OpenWeb server and then re-encrypted before sending to the secure site. Opera Mini and Skweezer do the same thing and for legal reasons OpenWeb V2 will continue to show a scary all-caps warning that traffic is not encrypted end to end when logging into HTTPS sites.

Mobile Fetch First should reduce the need to whitelist mobile sites but Sprint will continue to honor the exclusion list at least until testing confirms that V2 doesn't cause any problems. One of the Sprint representatives, I think it was Raymond Reeves, apologized for the problems that the first version of OpenWeb caused for some mobile publishers and promised to continue to work with independent mobile developers to avoid similar issues with future

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posted by Dennis Bournique
April 17, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
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