Share your know-how
The real problem with Vodafone's strategy is its unrealistically simplistic approach (i.e. disguise all clients no matter what, unless the site is white listed in advance).
A much more clever approach would have been to pass the request as is
and then look at the response to make a decision on what to do next.
There are 4 possible outcomes:
1) The provider responds with WML or XHTML-MP, supported by the
device (the proxy knows what is supported and what is not); in this case pass it through with no change.
2) The provider responds with HTML or some other content type not
supported by the device: apply content adaptation.
3) The provider returns a 406 error or whatever informing it does not
support the client user-agent. In this case try again the request
disguising the client, apply content adaptation, and remember to keep
adapting for the entire user session with the site.
4) The provider returns a "200 OK" but responds with an empty page. In this case do the same as for (3) above.
This would allow providers with mobile content to work fine and also
allow non mobile sites to be rendered properly in a transparent manner.
Is this so difficult to do? No is not. The engine already needs to cache the response in order to transform it. So the only thing here is to look at the cached response, see if it looks OK for the device and if so abort content adaptation and return original response as is. If it is not OK, then either proceed with adaptation or re-issue the request.
Jose Alberto
