WURFL mid-Spetember update

I originally started this blog to post freshnews about WURFL.
I understand that many people visit our website on sourceforge (http://wurfl.sf.net/), but I think that not as many read the wmlprogramming mailing list.
I thought that writing a blog might keep more people up-to-date.
On the other side there aren’t that many updates. I always work on WURFL, but there are not sensational updates. It’s a hard work and very time consuming, but I understand we don’t have anything sensational to write every single week.
I ended up writing posts about FireFox, my Apple-passion and so on. I wonder how many are really interested in that (and I also always wondered why should people be interested in blogs in general, but it looks like I’m one of the few thinking this). You will now ask yourself why would I write a blog if I think that most people from around the world will not give a damn about it. The answer is simple: testing. See how it works and how it comes out. How much interest is generated.

But now let’s get back to WURFL. If you are not updating directly from CVS regularly you are not very up-to-date about the changes. Thanks to Pau, one of our regular contributors, we are adding a TON of updated max_deck_size’s. This is done thanks to a script he prepared that checks values passed by the Openwave gateway (MAX_PDU_SIZE) that in general refers to the max_deck_size.
On the same topic, someone asked on the mailing list (1-2 days ago) if max_deck_size could be applied to xHTML and i-mode pages too.
For i-mode, as always, the answer is pretty simple: YES. To avoid adding a new capability we decided to recycle the one we already had.
For xHTML(-MP), as always, the answer is not so simple. There are some browsers, from Nokia and other manufacturers that may load pages of different size if it’s xHTML or WML. So the answer is basically “no”. When importing data I always try to keep the smaller (and safer) value.
We are now evaluating if we should add a new capability.
If you are interested and think it’s valuable you might consider promoting it and maybe become a mentor (work to keep it updated).

I also keep working to bring more and more user agents into the XML and parse UAProf’s to add the basic data. UAProf is very useful for us to determine and import basic information such as brand, model, screen size, j2me basic capabilities, MMS and more, but we do need developers’ support to update all the other more detailed (and valuable) info.

Please, keep your emails coming.

Some other things are happening in the underground, but I really can’t talk about them yet and also don’t want to make them public until they are real.

Stay tuned.