I’ve been talking with folks about transcoding for a long time, and it’s slipped into and out of my thoughtstream many times, mainly because I thought transcoding to be leading our thinking down the wrong path.
Transcoding is the re-rendering (through some proxy server) of a Web page into something that looks good and works well on a mobile. One fine example of transcoding is Google.
If you do a Google search from your phone, Google recognizes that it’s a phone searching and gives you a results page that is slightly different from what you would see on your PC browser. Then, when you click the link, Google serves you a text-only page that works on a mobile browser.
I guess that’s Transcoding 101 for you.
But, the simplicity is misleading. If you try to save the bookmark of the page Google served up to you, it will have a Google proxy address, not the direct address to that page. Also, some simple items like text boxes, say, for a site search, do not show up (this is actually the problem that set off this nano-rant). And finally, to add to (my) frustration, there is no way to view the page natively – while there are some helpful links that Google puts at the bottom of the pages they served, there is no way for me to get out of the Google transcoding.
So, while Google transcoding of all sites that you Google search for with your mobile can be very helpful, it highlights the pitfalls of transcoding – proxy issues, level of lost info, etc. – I am still not won over by the transcoding believers.
If you want to explore this topic further, search for ‘Google’ ‘transcoding’ ‘mobile’.
If I remember correctly, doing a Google search with Opera in Series 60 (just press 9) uses the proper full Google results, with links to real pages, just rendered for a small screen.
It’s so annoying to click through on the native browser and not get pictures, especially when you’re actually looking for a picture!
Opera can also toggle (with 5) whether images are shown or not.
The issues you’ve described are because transcoding is being not done right! Back in early 2000-2001 we (AGEA) had a pretty good transcoding (multi-channel) engine. It took care of all the limitations you mentioned, and did a very good job – the bookmarks, text boxes, formatting, support for many, many types of screen real state, and so on. My point is that your example points to the limitation of a particular transcoding solution, and it doesn’t have to be that way…
ceo
While I think transcoding text *can* be useful, I think we are still not addressing the core problem. Web does not equal mobile. Transcoding to me seems more like a band-aid instead of coming up with a better, more compelling way for people to have a good subscriber experience through the mobile web. Flash might be a better, stimulating UI, but evolution needs to happen for everyone to benefit.
eric,
i, too, have a slight reluctance to use transcoding, since it seems like the wrong way to go about it. but, i now think of the mobile experience as a continuum: the bulk of the web will never be modified to adapt to the mobile lifestyle. therefore, we need to be able to understand the web and convert it somehow – i.e. transcoding, plus some usability additions. moving up that continuum, you add more sophisticated transcoding for more sophisticated phones until you reach that flash level only found now on higher end phones. also, key sites that can afford it, can create css templates and specially build sites to cater to phones – folks like flickr, nokia, google, bloglines, and so on, have actually made specific mobile version of their sites. but, for the average site, that’s a lot to do.
while transcoding my seem like simple band-aid, it is a simple solution for helping millions of basic phones access and interact with info on the web.
tchau,
charlie