3 August 2007
Friday Afternoon Skweezer Update
Posted by Barnabas under: Uncategorized .
We just updated Skweezer again this afternoon with a few minor stability fixes and improvements. Among them:
- Once you log in, you now remain logged in for two weeks.
- For more modern phones Skweezer now allows limited CSS information which should make many pages look nicer and less bare. If you have a nice big color display, you should be able to use it. Of course, this means the page is not as small as before, but we want to push the limits of your phone’s browser.
- We’ve corrected HTML entity decoding errors that prevented some pages with foreign characters to display correctly.
- Device recognition has had an overhaul so that we can match unknown devices much better and we’re more likely to underestimate your device capabilities than overestimate them, if we can’t determine the device make and model.
- For desktop browsers, the images are not as overly compressed as they were. We’ll see how this works with our CPU and bandwidth.
We have done away with ASP.NET forms authentication once again due to its unreliability with mobile devices. ASP.NET second-guesses cookie setting somewhere, and sadly some cookies were being changed from absolute expiration to session cookies. This would require people to log in every time they closed their browser. Since user login is only protecting bookmarks now, we transitioned to a more mobile friendly home-grown solution.
For those devices that support it, CSS is limited to formatting elements only. Rules that influence properties such as margin, top, left, and padding are removed. CSS works for inline formatting, style blocks, and external style sheets. We do not yet handle @import declarations or composite rules such as “border: 1px solid black”. Here is the list of CSS properties that Skweezer currently supports: background-color, border-color, border-style, color, clear, float, display, font-family (generic names only), font-size (non-numeric only), font-style, font-weight, text-align, text-decoration, text-transform, vertical-align, and visibility. We are debating removing “float” because it does tend to make the document flow strange on small screens. Update: float is out; testers confirmed it is not good for small screens.
One major improvement with device recognition was the removal of strings such as “UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0″ from the end of the user agent. OpenWave has gateway software deployed at various carriers which rewrites the user agent with the software’s version. Although we thought that our fuzzy match algorithm took this into account, the removal of the version string makes the recognition engine much more reliable. We are also now trying to capture unknown user agents in an effort to do more research on their limitations.