Facebook launched a new mobile site on Thursday, one geared as much to feature phones as the most expensive mobile handsets.
The site name is the same: m.Facebook.com, which will replace Facebook’s previous sites at touch.facebook.com and m.facebook.com. The former site was geared towards high-end touchscreens, and the latter was a slimmed-down, simplified interface that was designed for feature phones. The ultra-stripped down site, 0.facebook.com, will also be folded into m.facebook.com, Lee Byron, a Facebook product designer, said in a blog post.
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“We think it’s important to provide an excellent mobile Web experience,” Byron wrote. “Now, whenever we launch new features on the mobile site, they’ll be available on any mobile browser, presented in the best possible experience.”
The new versions of the sites will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks, Byron wrote.
The key to all this? WURFL, an open-source device description repository, or an “‘ambitious’ configuration file that contains info about all known wireless devices on earth,” according to Luca Passani, who authored a background info page at SourceForge, where the WURFL code is hosted.
Previously, Facebook tried to write individual pages for as many devices as possible. This didn’t work, and in the mishmash of Javascript and CSS, features were left out and the user experience was degraded, Byron wrote.
By referring back to the WURFL database, Byron noted, one command can be written and then interpreted for a specific device, thus optimizing the experience.
“For other devices we can target specific issues,” Byron said. “For example, some devices don’t have keyboards, or have limited means of navigating a page, tiny screens, or crippling browser bugs. We can customize our site in each case to deal with these issues and provide the best possible experience to everyone.
“This mobile UI framework allows engineers to focus on building their product and not on supporting device edge cases,” Byron added. “Rather than directly writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, our product engineers write XHP and use these mobile components to build new features.”