The full “teaser” story text is now available through our RDF news feed. Additionally, the WAP users are now able to also read the 10 latest full teaser texts through their phones/PDAs (previously, only the 15 latest headlines were available). Please provide some feedback in the commenting section about our new WAP pages and how they work or don’t work with your mobile device (readers that don’t have a WAP device can preview our WAP pages with Opera). If your device is HTML-capable instead, you are in luck, as OSNews has some automatic special support for most mobile, embedded or text-mode browsers (Dreamcast, PS2, AtariST, WebTV, C64’s Contiki, SideKick & PepperPad among 130 others).
WAP, RDF Feeds OSNews Update
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
> The full “teaser” story text is now available through our RDF news feed.
Cool. Since I’ve started reading osnews primary through RSS aggregators like akregator and snownews, that is paricularily useful.
I love that app, I use it rather than RSS readers. It has supported the “teser text” for a while.
Seems to work well on an iPAQ 4150… except there is no way to view that pdf about FCon this device.
>Seems to work well on an iPAQ 4150…
Yes, we have special support for IE and Netfront. But these are not WAP browsers…
>except there is no way to view that pdf about FCon this device.
Why don’t you download and install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for PocketPC/PalmOS then? It’s free.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforppc.html
This comment is sendt from a NEC e616V mobile phone.It’s browser is html-capable, and renders osnews site perfectly. Excellent job Eugenia. I wish the other sites would follow your example. KDE,Gnome,and other community sites?
Good to hear. I checked my mobile statistics, your browser is a NetFront 3.x. (which we of course support with our mobile interface, as NetFront is one of the best mobile browsers around, it’s just that particularly when used in phones, it’s hardcoded with a huge font, taking away much needed space for no good reason — that’s my only gripe of NetFront in english phones, in its PDA version the problem does not exist).
haha, I just checked our mobile statistics again, and there are a bunch of readers clicking the wap link in the story with IE, Mozilla and Firefox… Of course, that doesn’t not work (they get a dialog to download the file instead of rendering it), as I am clear in the story, that only recent versions of Opera will work with that WAP link. Otherwise, you will need a real WAP device to render the link or an emulator (e.g. the Nokia or OpenWave browser emulators).
I just added a lot of new support, about 20 new mobile browsers, for our lite interface. Among them: Sunrise (the successor to JPluck for PDAs), Sagem, Panasonic, Siemens, 4-5 wap gateways, Obigo, Sendo, BenQ, PanTech and others. Mostly phones.
My Alcatel WAP 1.1 enabled mobile is able to browse the links with no problem. Thanks for this new OSnews service!
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I can see you in my stats:
Alcatel-BF3/1.0 UP.Browser/4.1.23a UP.Link/5.1.2.9
This is an old Openwave browser (wap-only), but as long as it works…
I use my Nokia 6100 with wap 1.2.1 quite frequently to read osnews titles. The new version of wap osnews works well too. Thanks!
Is it technical reasons that the full stories aren’t available over wap (page breaks and so on) or commerical reasons (no advertising)?
I’ve been using the OSNews’s WAP service for a while now, over 6 months, and have to say its one of the best wap sites. I find far too many of them tend to try and add useless extras into the wap site.
OSNews has it pinned, its small fast and direct to the point. And thats whats needed. Thankfully this new update to the way OSNews is displayed on my mobile phone hasn’t overdone it, but has infact added to the service. Just one thing I don’t understand, but this may be something that newer phones support, is why the wap site has links to the full story in html?
Keep up the good work, you rock
The new WAP pages work like a charm on my Nokia 3650! Great job!
I’d like to see the full stories over WAP sometime too. Older phones had a limitation of about 800 chars/page (if I remeber correctly). Newer ones don’t – they also support XHTML mobile profile, which you might want to consider in the future.
“Technical reasons”
Yes, many WAP 1.x devices don’t support WTP-SAR (Segmentation And Reassembly, the part of the TCP-like protocol that allows to send data over multiple packets and to reassemble the packets) and in general don’t have enough memory anyway to display decks that would require WTP-SAR (we’re talking about browsers that typically run in about 16kB of RAM). The only way to display long pieces of text in such devices is to split the text over multiple decks, which then have to be transmitted one at a time, resulting in a very poor user experience. The devices that would have enough memory to display a full article in a single deck typically have enough support for HTML to display the mobile HTML version.
“why […] links to the full story in html”
Because on most phones that support both WML and HTML you can directly navigate links between WML and HTML.
“Older phones had a limitation of about 800 chars/page (if I remeber correctly).”
The actual packet size depends on the device, on the gateway and on the underlying network. On top of that it depends on how well the deck gets encoded in WBXML, and on how big the WSP response headers are. A more typical value would be around 1200 to 1400 bytes of WBXML, but obviously the smaller the decks the safer. Some devices have limits that are as low as 400 bytes (the kind of device that displays 28 characters at a time and runs the browser in 4kB of RAM).
“they also support XHTML mobile profile”
A huge majority of devices that claim to support XHTML-MP actually support HTML well enough to display the mobile HTML version of OSnews (and don’t necessarily support XHTML-MP very well anyway or have severe performance issues with it) (in a majority of cases a level of translation happens in the gateway, which turns the incoming HTML/XHTML into the dialect that a particular device recognizes; in cases where the device itself has a full HTTP stack, the difference can sometimes be observed by delivering content through an SSL connection which prevents the gateway from doing any transcoding, but in that case the origin server must pay close attention to the HTTP request headers and satisfy the precise requirements from the device, e.g. by returning a document encoded with the right character set).
Now OSNews stories looks better in my self-build RSS reader.
I’ve used Klipfolio for a while now. You can also create klips from rss feeds, so I don’t even use a RSS reader anymore. Having the full teaser text is great! Thanks!
This is great. The news snippits work well.
The T630 is WAP 2.0 and is using GPRS to communicate.
The phone uses CHTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-compactHTML-19980209/
Regards
Aaron
If your phone supports cHTML, then you don’t have to use the WAP version. Just use the normal osnews version and you will be served a special mobile page that looks like the real OSNews, but has a lighter design and it’s particularly designed around cHTML.
Hi there
Yep I am using the cHTML link I think. The phone is
bookmarked to http://www.osnews.com. Out of curiosity
how big is the opening page. Also is the picture cached
by the phone.
regards
Aaron
The mobile front page is 29 to 31 KBs, depending on the amount of news text daily, which varies. This size includes the pictures. I don’t know if the pictures are cashed, this depends a lot on your browser too, not just our tags.
BTW, try our WAP too: http://WAP.osnews.com (the cHTML is at http://WWW.osnews.com )
Ok intresting.
http://WAP.osnews.com has ten headlines no pictures.
http://WWW.osnews.com has 15 headlines and the osnews
picture
http://wmlproxy.google.com/wmltrans/h-=en/g=/q=Osnes.com/s-=o/u=osn…
has the full teashers.
Why is this ?
>Why is this ?
There are many WAP phones that don’t support images. Also, a WAP page packet should never be bigger than 1 to 1.4 KB, or some phones would totally crash. So, no images for the WAP version should be there and no extra text that would go above that filesize limit.
The www cHTML version of OSNews for mobile/text-mode browsers is a normal HTML version for more capable, but still mobile or text, browsers. This is up to 31 KBs, including the images.
The “Google WML Proxy” is supported by our mobile detection script, and so when it hit the http://www.osnews.com, we serve it the above mobile cHTML version of OSNews. Then, Google translates the cHTML to WAP. That’s what you see through that proxy.
Try to hit us directly at http://www.osnews.com, not just through Google which translates everything to WAP.
To recap, there are four versions of OSNews:
1. Normal desktop http://www.osnews.com (HTML, 800×600 min res)
2. Mobile/text-mode http://www.osnews.com (autodetected, cHTML, 128×128 min res)
3. WAP wap.osnews.com (WML, any device and desktop Opera browser)
4. The subscriber’s version http://www.osnews.com (autodetected if user is a subscriber, no ads, HTML, 640×480 min, see http://www.osnews.com/demo.html with a desktop browser)
So, depending what your browser can do, use the appropriate version. Except for the WAP version which lives in a different URL, all other modes are autodetected and redirect the user to the right version of OSNews.
Thanks