User Agent
Detection and Client Device Capabilities Detection
Introduction
The
number of client devices supported by an application is a major
factor that determines whether the application will be a success or
failure. Building an application that supports lots of user agents is
not so straightforward because:
There
are many different types of wireless devices these days. For
example, there are cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants),
smart watches, etc. Each type of wireless device has very different
features and capabilities.
Even
for the same type of wireless device, there are many different
models and they have very different features and capabilities. For
example, some cell phone models have a large screen that supports a
high resolution; some have a color screen; some support both XHTML
MP and WML while some others only support WML; some support Java
applications while some others do not.
If
your application is required to work on both wireless devices and
personal computers, then you have to further take personal computers
into consideration. Computers and wireless devices have very
different features and capabilities.
In
this tutorial, we will describe two common ways for detecting user
agent types and device capabilities. The first way is to use the
information in some traditional HTTP headers such as Accept,
User-Agent,
Accept-Charset and
Accept-Language. The
second way is to use UAProf (User Agent Profile), the standard way
defined by the Open Mobile Alliance (formerly the WAP Forum) for
detecting user agent types and device capabilities.
The
advantage of UAProf is that it provides more detail information about
the user agent and the wireless device than traditional HTTP headers.
The drawback of UAProf is that old wireless device models do not
support it.
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