Sunday, June 5, 2011

Separate domain for desktop

Hi!

I just had a simple (maybe obvious), powerful idea for mobile web development (and for mobile users).

There's a design pattern called mobile first, which is very well shown in these slides by Bryan Rieger.

Following that thinking, we can apply it even on domain/subdomain names - not just for web contents.

E.g.: instead of having a main domain for desktop, and a separate (and longer) domain for mobiles, we can define the shorter domain for mobiles, and a separate (and longer) domain for desktops!

That is, instead of the common procedure of having:

http://example.com/ (for desktops)
http://m.example.com/ (for mobiles)


this proposal is to do:

http://example.com/ (for mobiles)
http://desktop.example.com/ (for desktops)


as desktop users can type more easily than mobile users, and desktop browsers can detect they're desktop more easily than mobile browsers can detect they're mobile (via JS, media queries, etc.).

Anyway, if your code can auto-detect (decently) a real desktop user, it can redirect the browser from the main url to the desktop one. (And the redirection is performed better on desktops than on mobiles.)

Here is my idea; I'll apply it into my projects and I'm sharing it to you to use it freely - and heavily! ;)

1 comment:

  1. Better yet - why not make the web server auto-detect from which platform is it accessed and serve up the content in the proper way? I, as the content creator, can still control what content is displayed, and how, on the various platforms.

    Take a look at this: lessframework.com

    Cheers,

    Bart

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