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kdarling · 04-10-2008, 07:48 PM

Often this simply means that the programmer for that site has an iPhone themselves. Some people prefer a mobile site at times, for speed of download and ease of use. (I do sometimes, when I want to read news quickly. Scrolling around on a tiny screen is for people who have the time.)

For those who don't program web, here's how it works. Every browser sends a User Agent string with each request. In the case of the iPhone, it says something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

So the web site programmer watches for "iPhone" or "Mobile". (The iPod touch sends "Touch" I think instead of "iPhone".)

As someone else mentioned, iPhone Safari needs an option to send a different User Agent. It'd be best if it could be saved on a per-bookmark basis, too.

In the meantime, you should write the site and ask that they also include a way for iPhone users to get in and keep the original format.

04-10-2008, 07:48 PM	#7 (permalink)
kdarling Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: NJ, NC, CO Posts: 387 Thanks: 0 Thanked 8 Times in 6 Posts	Often this simply means that the programmer for that site has an iPhone themselves. Some people prefer a mobile site at times, for speed of download and ease of use. (I do sometimes, when I want to read news quickly. Scrolling around on a tiny screen is for people who have the time.) For those who don't program web, here's how it works. Every browser sends a User Agent string with each request. In the case of the iPhone, it says something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 So the web site programmer watches for "iPhone" or "Mobile". (The iPod touch sends "Touch" I think instead of "iPhone".) As someone else mentioned, iPhone Safari needs an option to send a different User Agent. It'd be best if it could be saved on a per-bookmark basis, too. In the meantime, you should write the site and ask that they also include a way for iPhone users to get in and keep the original format.