Computers & Hardware > Apple Related
"Request desktop site"
Weaver:
In iOS Safari there is a menu option ‘request desktop site’. I have now found out that don’t actually know what it does, but I used to think I did.I’m hoping someone can tell me what is actually going on. My questions:
* Could someone help me understand what it is supposed to do?
* how does this actually work, at a low level?
* is the following assessment vaguely correct, or not?
Some times it seems to make the appearance better, sometimes worse. Take Wikipedia for example. Selecting the option causes the page to be redrawn with a totally different appearance. Before, the page was very much simplified with a lot of stuff missing. The column down the left is missing as is the row across the top with various controls and options that Wikipedia routinely provides on a Windows box in a desktop web browser. These reappear when you hit the request desktop site option. Which is as you would expect. There’s more to it than that though. On my iPad Pro in landscape mode, with my terrible eyesight the test is quite small, usually not such a bad thing.
Bizarrely, if you hit it a second time, then I suspect it toggles, putting you back into the original state but there is no UI to tell you this or tell you which state you are in. It doesn’t change to say ‘request iPad site’ to reflect the fact that the option will now do the opposite. (If my guess is right.)
After hitting it a second time, the text is a bit larger, which is something I would normally moan about, but this geriatric’s eyesight is now so appalling that the clearer as well as larger text is quite welcome. It’s just better typography too I would think, and it uses a lot more of the page’s horizontal width. In the ‘desktop?’ state the text is flowed in a column of limited width wasting a lot of the x-width completely, for just no reason at all. Wikipedia should, if it is worried about excessive horizontal width of lines of text, switch to using newspaper columns with modern css3 facilities.
jelv:
How it works:
Mobile site:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_PageDesktop:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Other sites do similar - I've seen the mobile URL preceded by m. on several.
Weaver:
So does it speculatively just try a head operation on m.whatever?
sevenlayermuddle:
@Weaver, I really don’t know, but I’d like to.
Years ago, “mobile devices” were served by WAP which is now, I believe, pretty much obsolete. Mobile browsers identified themselves as WAP, which was a markup language of its own. If I understand right (I probably don’t), it was effectively cut-down version of HTML. And in those days it was a simple boolean choice... is it WAP, or HTML?
A basic mobile device, with limited screen resolution and low data rate, would be served WAP content. But a very advanced (by contemporary standards) phone that supported full HTML could just access the HTML version, rather than WAP.
Nowadays, I really don’t know how to predict what will happen when I select “desktop site”. Sometimes it does what I want, which is to show the site as it would appear on a desktop PC. But not always. From a quick search I don’t think this uncertainty is restricted to Apple, the same choices exist with Google software.
Sorry, nothing helpful there, more questions than answers. :(
Weaver:
At work I looked at the spec for WAP which was something very very different from the internet. WML produced very crude and nasty results and no one took any notice of it.
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