A little brief, but this is actually really interesting ‘cause it’s about how servers/CDN’s and browsers work together to express the priorities of their requests, and how HTTP/2 changes that.
Speed up mobile page loads, specifically mobile-device “m-dot” redirects.
Since this is mentioned - does anyone know why does Wikimedia do this redirect? If they know they should be doing a mobile view, why not handle it right there, without a redirect? It’s one of the very few pages that does something silly like that and I have to make sure to delete the m-dot if I’m sharing the links to other people, in case they’re on desktop.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 has a lot of detail on this. It’s mostly a legacy artifact of the mobile site being a side thing and now lack of resourcing to move onto the main domain.
Hampton Catlin (the Sass guy) is my friend from college. When the iPhone came out, he wanted to make a Wikipedia app, but he was a Rails developer not an ObjC guy. So, he made thin shell app around a WebView that called into his proxy sever, which did a dynamic rewrite to Wikipedia to be more mobile friendly. This was such a success that he sold it to Wikipedia themselves as m.wikipedia. I’m sure it’s evolved some since then, but that’s how it started and AFAIK still largely works.
A little brief, but this is actually really interesting ‘cause it’s about how servers/CDN’s and browsers work together to express the priorities of their requests, and how HTTP/2 changes that.
Since this is mentioned - does anyone know why does Wikimedia do this redirect? If they know they should be doing a mobile view, why not handle it right there, without a redirect? It’s one of the very few pages that does something silly like that and I have to make sure to delete the m-dot if I’m sharing the links to other people, in case they’re on desktop.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 has a lot of detail on this. It’s mostly a legacy artifact of the mobile site being a side thing and now lack of resourcing to move onto the main domain.
Historical background:
Hampton Catlin (the Sass guy) is my friend from college. When the iPhone came out, he wanted to make a Wikipedia app, but he was a Rails developer not an ObjC guy. So, he made thin shell app around a WebView that called into his proxy sever, which did a dynamic rewrite to Wikipedia to be more mobile friendly. This was such a success that he sold it to Wikipedia themselves as m.wikipedia. I’m sure it’s evolved some since then, but that’s how it started and AFAIK still largely works.