I pointed out on Monday how Dennis at Wap Review had discovered that Sprint has rolled out a lovely transcoder — a la Vodafone — that sends a dummy user agent to web sites, instead of the proper user agent of their customers’ handsets. The latest update was that people could ask for their sites to be white-listed in Sprint’s developer forums, but as Dennis says in his latest post, that solution doesn’t scale.
But I’m sure that 100’s of thousands of mobile site owners and content providers around the world have no idea that Sprint is trampling on their content and that they have to register on Sprint’s developer portal and ask that their markup and headers be left alone. This sort of whitelisting is completely unscalable on the vast world wide (mobile) web. I encourage every mobile site owner to contact Sprint and request exclusion… I’d love to see Sprint get swamped with thousands of exclusion requests. Maybe they would start to realize that what they are doing is a huge screw up.
Furthermore, Dennis has found that the Openwave transcoder Sprint’s implementing does a poor job of reformatting, as it ignores external stylesheets and makes a few other foibles he hadn’t noticed earlier.
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